In this masters thesis by Marcin Jdrzejewski, ray tracing is implemented on the GPU to accelerate computation of sound paths between sound sources and receivers. Each ray averages 16-20 wall reflections, and those rays that intersect a sphere approximating the receiver are included in an echogram that is used in the auralization process. Typically 4096 rays are used, but the application can run in real time with up to 64K rays. A demo application, article and some movies can be downloaded from the following link. (Computation of room acoustics on a GPU.)

From a press release at www.BionicFX.com: “BionicFX announces a revolutionary technology for music production that turns NVIDIA video cards into audio effects processors. Audio Video Exchange (AVEX) converts digital audio into graphics data, and then performs effect calculations using the 3D architecture of the GPU. The latest video cards from NVIDIA are capable of more than 40 gigaflops of processing power compared to less than 6 gigaflops on Intel and AMD CPUs. AVEX represents a major technological achievement that allows music hobbyists and professional artists to run studio quality audio effects at high sample rates on their desktop computer. (Press Release: “Revolutionary Programming and Innovation uses GPU as Powerful Audio Effect Processor”)