Sound ontology for computational auditory scene analysis

This paper proposes that sound ontology should be both as a common vocabulary for sound representation and as a common terminology for integrating various sound stream segregation systems. Since research on computational auditory scene analysis (CASA) focuses on recognizing and understanding various kinds of sounds, sound stream segregation which extracts each sound stream from a mixture of sounds is essential for CASA. Even if sound stream segregation systems use a harmonic structure of sound as a cue of segregation, it is not easy to integrate such systems because the definition of a harmonic structure differs or the precision of extracted harmonic structures differs. Therefore, sound ontology is needed as a common knowledge representation of sounds. Another problem is to interface sound stream segregation systems with applications such as automatic speech recognition systems. Since the requirement of the quality of segregated sound streams depends on applications, sound stream segregation systems must provide a flexible interface. Therefore, sound ontology is needed to fulfill the requirements imposed by them. In addition, the hierarchical structure of sound ontology provides a means of controlling top-down and bottom-up processing of sound stream segregation.