Sound Particles is a Portuguese startup that develops 3D audio software used by major video game companies and Hollywood studios in productions such as Indiana Jones, Oppenheimer, Mission Impossible, Game of Thrones, Frozen, Dune, and Star Wars. The company is now working on a personalised solution where the user hears the same "real world" sound in the headphones. This is made possible by 3D models of the head and ears and artificial intelligence.
The story of Sound Particles began more than a decade ago at the hands of Nuno Fonseca, its CEO, who is passionate about cinema and music. "I realised that the most interesting visual effects I saw in the cinema used particle systems, a computer graphics technique that uses thousands of tiny dots, which create effects such as fire, explosions, smoke, fairy dust, or sandstorms. And that's when I thought: why not apply the same logic to sound?"
The idea was put into practice in 2012 after Nuno Fonseca finished his PhD in another area of computer audio. He created a 3D simulator that uses computer graphics and visual effects concepts applied to sound.
