Automatic morphological description of sounds
Geoffroy G. Peeters, Emmanuel Deruty · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2008
Morphological description has been proposed by Pierre Schaeffer. It consists in describing sounds by identifying the temporal evolution of their acoustical properties to a set of profiles. This kind of description is especially useful for indexing sounds with unknown cause such as SoundFX. The present work deals with the automatic estimation of this morphological description from audio signal analysis. In this work, three morphological descriptions are considered: - dynamic profiles (ascending, descending, ascending/descending, stable, impulsive), - melodic profiles (asc., desc. fixed, up/down, down/up) - repetition profiles. For each case we present the most appropriate audio features (loudness, pitch, pitch salience, temporal increase/decrease, lag-matrix-periodicity, ...) and mapping algorithm (slope computed from spline approximations of temporal profiles, ...) used to automatically estimate the profiles. We demonstrate the use of these descriptions for automatic indexing (using decision trees) and search-by-similarity of SoundFX.