Berkeley Ear Club
3105 Tolman Hall (Beach Room)

First Fall 09 Ear Club Meeting
September 14, 2009
4:00 PM
Free

David Wessel
Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT)
Department of Music
University of California Berkeley

The Landscape of Audio Descriptors

A large number of signal features have been proposed for sound description. In this talk I hope to layout the landscape of research on audio descriptors and assess their perceptual relevance, their effectiveness in automatic classification and tracking, and their use in sound synthesis. Demonstrations of real-time descriptor extraction and its application will be presented. A taxonomy will be provided for descriptions for temporal envelop and spectral shape, energy features, harmonic features and a host of others like those from the MPEG-7 Low Level Audio Descriptors. The temporal dynamics of instantaneous descriptors will be considered as well as methods for feature enhancement for possible use in hearing aids.