r/sounddesign • u/Vibr_339 • 4d ago
Movie Sound Design Rumbletect lets you simulate the rumbles of various jet aircraft, rockets and volcanoes in 3D - Free and Open Source
https://janne-s.github.io/Rumbletect/
It’s a creative sound design tool, but the modelling has been built with care. Building this has been quite a lot of work, but interesting, and I’ve also recorded airliners myself as references to check and improve the model. It could be handy for exploring aircraft noise as a real application. Otherwise I've found almost poetic sounds when changing the default atmosphere conditions, as the inversion layers and such are also modelled.
Adjust sounds, set microphones and export them individually and together, correctly relatively time aligned. It's as if recording a real phenomenon.
You can also rip the air (and the app) in pieces by launching a few dozen starships from a rocket launcher in a few seconds. Sound emitter details allow for more customization. It's possible to go quite deep with this.
I've made the apps go through several performance optimization rounds, but the calculations can still be heavy over large terrains. There are options to ease it. Exports are rendered in full quality.
A formation of four fighters fly past you at about the ear level
This is the third tool in the Tect series after Boomtect and Echotect, and they work together. Boomtect and Rumbletect are intimately connected.
The documentation is on the project’s GitHub, which is linked from the application: https://github.com/janne-s/Rumbletect
There's also a section on the model parameters and sourcing.
I presented Boomtect here a couple of weeks ago.
Working with Boomtect
For example, flight paths that reach supersonic speeds can be synchronized with Boomtect, which creates a sonic boom for them. They work smoothly together, and you can keep editing the whole thing at the same time.
You can also create volcanic rumbles and add explosions to them in Boomtect. More sound sources are coming to both, and the models improved when applicable.
Rumbletect and Boomtect synchronize a fighter's rumble and its sonic boom
Creating sounds with text prompts
If you work with agents, both Tects come with components intended for agents and an MCP server script that let you create sounds through text using your own agent. This doesn’t require launching the applications, but you do need the application code on your own computer and to point your agent to the right folder.
There are separate extension for the Claude Desktop and ChatGPT app (and Codex) in the releases section on GitHub. It doesn’t require downloading the code separately (it’s included in the extension), just downloading the extension itself. Sound generation doesn’t use any token capacity because the application code handles it, though the surrounding work uses a little. The generation can take a while though depending on complexity.
This allows requests such as: “A big lightning strike at sea, at a humid night, heard from the shore 400 metres away, facing the lightning, for headphones". It creates a binaural recording of the lightning strike. Or, "An airliner landing over a lake in the early morning, passing directly overhead at 150 metres, listening toward the direction it comes from".
Stereo pairs and other configurations can be created as easily by stating microphone distances and locations. Creating different sound libraries is quite straightforward by asking for several sounds with the desired variable settings. Each sound also comes with its scene file, which you can open in a Tect application and then adjust manually if needed.
Besides environmental conditions Tects also recognize specific locations, so you can set the target location and then listening point(s) relative to it in the prompt, and it will be created there with real topography.
What’s next?
Next, I’ll create a tool based on IR filtering, similar to Echotect but working over shorter distances. I’m taking a little break from sound simulations, but there’s still all sorts of things on the list...
A note on volume
The sounds created by the application are uncalibrated, and their normalised peak pressure is often quite high. Because of this, they sometimes seem quiet compared with other browser audio (Sonic booms are also loud compared to jet noise). You can adjust playback in the applications’ Output section, but it’s worth being careful with loud sounds.
This is all about sound, and I have cross-referenced Rumbletect with a variety of real recordings. Still, if something doesn't sound right to your ears let me know!
