TY - GEN
T1 - Crowdsourcing a reverberation descriptor map
AU - Seetharaman, Prem
AU - Pardo, Bryan A
PY - 2014/11/3
Y1 - 2014/11/3
N2 - Audio production is central to every kind of media that involves sound, such as film, television, and music and involves transforming audio into a state ready for consumption by the public. One of the most commonly-used audio production tools is the reverberator. Current interfaces are often complex and hard-to-understand. We seek to simplify these interfaces by letting users communicate their audio production objective with descriptive language (e.g. "Make the drums sound bigger."). To achieve this goal, a system must be able to tell whether the stated goal is appropriate for the selected tool (e.g. making the violin warmer using a panning tool does not make sense). If the goal is appropriate for the tool, it must know what actions lead to the goal. Further, the tool should not impose a vocabulary on users, but rather understand the vocabulary users prefer. In this work, we describe SocialReverb, a project to crowdsource a vocabulary of audio descriptors that can be mapped onto concrete actions using a parametric reverberator. We deployed SocialReverb, on Mechanical Turk, where 513 unique users described 256 instances of reverberation using 2861 unique words. We used this data to build a concept map showing which words are popular descriptors, which ones map consistently to specific reverberation types, and which ones are synonyms. This promises to enable future interfaces that let the user communicate their production needs using natural language.
AB - Audio production is central to every kind of media that involves sound, such as film, television, and music and involves transforming audio into a state ready for consumption by the public. One of the most commonly-used audio production tools is the reverberator. Current interfaces are often complex and hard-to-understand. We seek to simplify these interfaces by letting users communicate their audio production objective with descriptive language (e.g. "Make the drums sound bigger."). To achieve this goal, a system must be able to tell whether the stated goal is appropriate for the selected tool (e.g. making the violin warmer using a panning tool does not make sense). If the goal is appropriate for the tool, it must know what actions lead to the goal. Further, the tool should not impose a vocabulary on users, but rather understand the vocabulary users prefer. In this work, we describe SocialReverb, a project to crowdsource a vocabulary of audio descriptors that can be mapped onto concrete actions using a parametric reverberator. We deployed SocialReverb, on Mechanical Turk, where 513 unique users described 256 instances of reverberation using 2861 unique words. We used this data to build a concept map showing which words are popular descriptors, which ones map consistently to specific reverberation types, and which ones are synonyms. This promises to enable future interfaces that let the user communicate their production needs using natural language.
KW - Audio descriptors
KW - Audio engineering
KW - Audio synonyms
KW - Human computation
KW - Interfaces
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84913534922&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84913534922&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/2647868.2654908
DO - 10.1145/2647868.2654908
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84913534922
T3 - MM 2014 - Proceedings of the 2014 ACM Conference on Multimedia
SP - 587
EP - 596
BT - MM 2014 - Proceedings of the 2014 ACM Conference on Multimedia
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
T2 - 2014 ACM Conference on Multimedia, MM 2014
Y2 - 3 November 2014 through 7 November 2014
ER -