Soundscape design through evolutionary engines

Abstract

Two implementations of an Evolutionary Sound Synthesis method using the Interaural Time Difference (ITD) and psychoacoustic descriptors are presented here as a way to develop criteria for fitness evaluation. We also explore a relationship between adaptive sound evolution and three soundscape characteristics: key-sounds, key-signals and sound-marks. Sonic Localization Field is defined using a sound attenuation factor and ITD azimuth angle, respectively (Ii, Li. These pairs are used to build Spatial Sound Genotypes (SSG) and they are extracted from a waveform population set. An explanation on how our model was initially written in MATLAB is followed by a recent Pure Data (Pd) implementation. It also elucidates the development and use of parametric scores, a triplet of psychoacoustic descriptors and the correspondent graphical user interface.