Narrative Structure Detection through Audio Pace
S. Moncrief, S. Venkateshf · 2006
We use the concept of film pace, expressed through the audio, to analyze the broad level narrative structure of film. The narrative structure is divided into visual narration, action sections, and audio narration, plot development sections. We hypothesize that changes in the narrative structure signal a change in audio content, which is reflected by a change in audio pace. We test this hypothesis using a number of audio feature functions that reflect the audio pace, to detect changes in narrative structure for 8 films of varying genres. The properties of the energy were then used to determine the audio pace feature corresponding to the narrative structure for each film analyzed. The method was successful in determining the narrative structure for 7 of the films, achieving an overall precision of 76.4% and recall of 80.3%. We map the properties of the speech and energy of film audio to the higher level semantic concept of audio pace. The audio pace was in turn applied to a higher level semantic analysis of the structure of film.