Introduction to sound scene and event analysis

Abstract

Sounds carry a great deal of information about our environments, from individual physical events to sound scenes as a whole. In recent years several novel methods have been proposed to analyze this information automatically, and several new applications have emerged. This chapter introduces the basic concepts and research problems and engineering challenges in computational environmental sound analysis. We motivate the field by briefly describing various applications where the methods can be used. We discuss the commonalities and differences of environmental sound analysis to other major audio content analysis fields such as automatic speech recognition and music information retrieval. We discuss the main challenges in the field, and give a short historical perspective of the development of the field. We also shortly summarize the role of each chapter in the book.