Using morphological description for generic sound retrieval

Abstract

Systems for sound retrieval are usually “source-centred”. This means that retrieval is based on using the proper keywords that define or specify a sound source. Although this type of description is of great interest, it is very difficult to implement it into realistic automatic labelling systems because of the necessity of dealing with thousands of categories, hence with thousands of different sound models. Moreover, digitally synthesised or transformed sounds, which are frequently used in most of the contemporary popular music, have no identifiable sources. We propose a description framework, based on Schaeffer’s research on a generalised solfeggio which could be applied to any type of sounds. He defined some morphological description criteria, based on intrinsic perceptual qualities of sound, which doesn’t refer to the cause or the meaning of a sound. We describe more specifically experiments on automatic extraction of morphological descriptors.