Techniques for soundscape retrieval and synthesis

The study of acoustic ecology is concerned with the manner in which life interacts with its environment as mediated through sound. As such, a central focus is that of the soundscape: the acoustic environment as perceived by a listener. This dissertation examines the application of several computational tools in the realms of digital signal processing, multimedia information retrieval, and computer music synthesis to the analysis of the soundscape. Namely, these tools include a) an open source software library, Sirens, which can be used for the segmentation of long environmental field recordings into individual sonic events and compare these events in terms of acoustic content, b) a graph-based retrieval system that can use these measures of acoustic similarity and measures of semantic similarity using the lexical database WordNet to perform both text-based retrieval and automatic annotation of environmental sounds, and c) new techniques for the dynamic, realtime parametric morphing of multiple field recordings, informed by the geographic paths along which they were recorded.