Annotating soundscapes

Abstract

We describe a soundscape annotation tool for unconstrained environmental sounds. The tool segments the time-frequency-plane into regions that are likely to stem from a single source. A human annotator can classify these regions. The system learns to suggest possible annotations and presents these for acceptance. Accepted or corrected annotations will be used to improve the classification further. Automatic annotations with a very high probability of being correct might be accepted by default. This speeds up the annotation process and makes it possible to annotate complex soundscapes both quickly and in considerable detail. We performed a pilot on recordings of uncontrolled soundscapes at locations in Assen (NL) made in the early spring of 2009. Initial results show that the system is able to propose the correct class in 75% of the cases.