A NEW PARADIGM FOR SOUND DESIGN

A sound scene can be defined as any "environmental" sound that has a consistent background texture, with one or more potentially recurring foreground events. We describe a data-driven framework for analyzing, transforming, and synthesizing high-quality sound scenes, with flexible control over the components of the synthe- sized sound. Given one or more sound scenes, we provide well- defined means to: (1) identify points of interest in the sound and extract them into reusable templates, (2) transform sound compo- nents independently of the background or other events, (3) contin- ually re-synthesize the background texture in a perceptually con- vincing manner, and (4) controllably place event templates over the background, varying key parameters such as density, period- icity, relative loudness, and spatial positioning. Contributions in- clude: techniques and paradigms for template selection and extrac- tion, independent sound transformation and flexible re-synthesis; extensions to a wavelet-based background analysis/synthesis; and user interfaces to facilitate the various phases. Given this frame- work, it is possible to completely transform an existing sound scene, dynamically generate sound scenes of unlimited length, and con- struct new sound scenes by combining elements from different sound scenes. URL: http://taps.cs.princeton.edu/