SEMI-AUTOMATIC AMBIANCE GENERATION

Abstract

Ambiances are background recordings used in audiovisual productions to make listeners feel they are in places like a pub or a farm. Accessing to commercially available atmosphere libraries is a convenient alternative to sending teams to record ambiances yet they limit the creation in different ways. First, they are already mixed, which reduces the flexibility to add, remove individual sounds or change its panning. Secondly, the number of ambient libraries is limited. We propose a semi-automatic system for ambiance generation. The system creates ambiances on demand given text queries by fetching relevant sounds from a large sound effect database and importing them into a sequencer multitrack project. Ambiances of diverse nature can be created easily. Several controls are provided to the users to refine the type of samples and the sound arrangement.