A Method for Automatic Whoosh Sound Description

Evgenii Chernyi, Johan Lilius, Dmitry Mouromtsev

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceedingConference contributionScientificpeer-review

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Abstract

Usually, a sound designer achieves artistic goals by editing and processing thepre-recorded sound samples. To assist navigation in the vast amount of sounds,the sound metadata is used: it provides small free-form textual descriptions ofthe sound file content. One can search through the keywords or phrases in themetadata to find a group of sounds that can be suitable for a task.Unfortunately, the relativity of the sound design terms complicate the search,making the search process tedious, prone to errors and by no means supportive ofthe creative flow. Another way to approach the sound search problem is to usesound analysis. In this paper we present a simple method for analyzing thetemporal evolution of the ``whoosh'' sound, based on the per-band piecewiselinear function approximation of the sound envelope signal. The method usesspectral centroid and fuzzy membership functions to estimate a degree to whichthe sound energy moves upwards or downwards in the frequency domain along theaudio file. We evaluated the method on a generated dataset, consisting of whitenoise recordings processed with different variations of modulated bandpassfilters. The method was able to correctly identify the centroid movementdirections in 77% sounds from a synthetic dataset.

Original languageUndefined/Unknown
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 20th International Conference on Digital Audio Effects (DAFx-17), Edinburgh, UK, September 5–9, 2017
EditorsAlberto Torin, Brian Hamilton, Stefan Bilbao, Michael Newton
Pages459–465
Publication statusPublished - 2017
MoE publication typeA4 Article in a conference publication
EventProceedings of the International Conference on Digital Audio Effects (DAFx) - International Conference on Digital Audio Effects
Duration: 5 Sept 20179 Sept 2017

Conference

ConferenceProceedings of the International Conference on Digital Audio Effects (DAFx)
Period05/09/1709/09/17

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