Scaper: A library for soundscape synthesis and augmentation

Justin Salamon, Duncan MacConnell, Mark Cartwright, Peter Li, Juan Pablo Bello

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

138 Scopus citations

Abstract

Sound event detection (SED) in environmental recordings is a key topic of research in machine listening, with applications in noise monitoring for smart cities, self-driving cars, surveillance, bioa-coustic monitoring, and indexing of large multimedia collections. Developing new solutions for SED often relies on the availability of strongly labeled audio recordings, where the annotation includes the onset, offset and source of every event. Generating such precise annotations manually is very time consuming, and as a result existing datasets for SED with strong labels are scarce and limited in size. To address this issue, we present Scaper, an open-source library for soundscape synthesis and augmentation. Given a collection of iso-lated sound events, Scaper acts as a high-level sequencer that can generate multiple soundscapes from a single, probabilistically defined, 'specification'. To increase the variability of the output, Scaper supports the application of audio transformations such as pitch shifting and time stretching individually to every event. To illustrate the potential of the library, we generate a dataset of 10,000 sound-scapes and use it to compare the performance of two state-of-The-Art algorithms, including a breakdown by soundscape characteristics. We also describe how Scaper was used to generate audio stimuli for an audio labeling crowdsourcing experiment, and conclude with a discussion of Scaper's limitations and potential applications.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication2017 IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics, WASPAA 2017
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages344-348
Number of pages5
ISBN (Electronic)9781538616321
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 7 2017
Externally publishedYes
Event2017 IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics, WASPAA 2017 - New Paltz, United States
Duration: Oct 15 2017Oct 18 2017

Publication series

NameIEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics
Volume2017-October

Conference

Conference2017 IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics, WASPAA 2017
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityNew Paltz
Period10/15/1710/18/17

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering
  • Computer Science Applications

Keywords

  • Soundscape
  • sound event detection
  • synthesis

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