You're spot on there. I will develop the stereo image as I work on the environment model.
But interestingly enough, lightning _is_ an explosion, one hell of a big explosion. The plasma is as hot as the Sun for an instant and that's why the air expands, the energy in a lightning bold makes most bombs seem like little fireworks. The difference is, and this is unusual, it radiates in a cylinder not a sphere, and sound comes from a simultanoeus extent (because the bolt moves at the speed of electricity which is closer to the speed of light than the speed of sound)
What I have is still a bit too much like Scooby Doo Castle thunder. Having once been caught in a storm with bolts hitting a few hundred meters from me I know from experience it sounds nothing like that, it's a very difficult sound to capture synthetically.
The way I'm trying now is a kind of physical model, taking into account thousands of tiny wavelets called N-waves that each come from a kink in the lightning bolt - strangely (because of interference patterns that cancel out) the shape of the lighning bolt has a direct correlation to the sound.
cheers, a.
On Tue, 5 Feb 2008 13:29:11 +0900 "hard off" hard.off@gmail.com wrote:
just a suggestion:
i think the reason why they sound a bit like explosions, rather than thunder, is because the cracks of thunder are propogated directly in front of you. maybe some sort of spatialization could make the crack appear more overhead, and then the rumble lower down?