SoundToons: Exemplar-Based Authoring of Interactive Audio-Driven Animation Sprites

Animations can come to life when they are synchronized with relevant sounds. Yet, synchronizing animations to audio requires tedious key-framing or programming, which is difficult for novice creators. There are existing tools that support audio-driven live animation, but they focus primarily on speech and have little or no support for non-speech sounds. We present SoundToons, an exemplar-based authoring tool for interactive, audio-driven animation focusing on non-speech sounds. Our tool enables novice creators to author live animations to a wide variety of non-speech sounds, such as clapping and instrumental music. We support two types of audio interactions: (1) discrete interaction, which triggers animations when a discrete sound event is detected, and (2) continuous, which synchronizes an animation to continuous audio parameters. By employing an exemplar-based iterative authoring approach, we empower novice creators to design and quickly refine interactive animations. User evaluations demonstrate that novice users can author and perform live audio-driven animation intuitively. Moreover, compared to other input modalities such as trackpads or foot pedals, users preferred using audio as an intuitive way to drive animation.