I wrote this paper as part of a research seminar course that I took as a graduate student at American University.

Abstract:
Modern video games contain thousands of individual sound files: music, sound effects, ambiences, and dialog. Most of these are processed and manipulated in some way during playback and it takes a good amount of CPU (central processing unit) headroom to handle all of that processing, even with the power CPUs offer today. I believe that creation of a suc- cessful APU that could calculate sonic transformations of sounds based on situational proper- ties such as travel medium, obstructions/occlusions, travel distance, environmental absorption rates, temperature, refraction, and other acoustic properties could be the next frontier in im- mersive entertainment, for gaming and beyond. This paper assesses several components of realistic acoustic modeling, recent methods and research regarding their implementation, and seeks to determine the feasibility of combining them into one acoustic modeling system that could be implemented onto a discrete audio processing unit chip(set).

The paper is available to read here.