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Semantic and Perceptual Management of Sound Effects in Production Systems

Title Semantic and Perceptual Management of Sound Effects in Production Systems
Publication Type Conference Paper
Year of Publication 2004
Authors Cano, P. , Koppenberger M. , Le Groux S. , Ricard J. , & Wack N.
Abstract Main professional sound effects (SFX) providers offer their collections using standard text-retrieval technologies. SFX cataloging is an error-prone and labor consuming task. The vagueness of the query specification, normally one or two words, together with the ambiguity and informality of natural languages affects the quality of the search Some relevant sounds are not retrieved and some irrelevant ones are presented to the user. The use of ontologies alleviates some of the ambiguity problems inherent to natural languages, yet they pose others. It is very complicated to devise and maintain an ontology that account for the level of detail needed in a production-size sound effect management system. To address this problem we use WordNet, an ontology that organizes real world knowledge e.g. it relates doors to locks, to wood and to the actions of knocking. However a fundamental issue remains sounds without caption are invisible to the users. Content-based audio tools offer perceptual ways of navigating the audio collections, like find similar sounds, even if unlabeled, or query-by-example. We describe the integration of semantically-enhanced management of metadata using WordNet together with content-based methods in a commercial sound effect management system.
preprint/postprint document files/publications/ibc2004-pcano.pdf