Trends in Audio Texture Analysis, Synthesis, and Applications

Abstract

Audio signals are classified into speech, music, and environmental sounds. From the evolution of audio features, an adequate amount of work has been seen in speech and music processing. On the other hand, the environmental sounds have not been studied that much, and the major reason behind it is the lack of coherent information present in an environmental sound compared with the speech signal or a musical sound. The definition to express audio textures is imprecise and insufficient, so audio textures tend to be defined by drawing a comparison to the known sound source (e.g., "it sounds like a motor" or "like a fan"). Audio textures could be either natural or artificial. Natural audio textures, such as heavy rain, fire, and stream flowing, are very common. The artificial audio textures include sounds such as applause, a motor running, someone walking on gravel, babble, and many more. Although these audio textures have been used in virtual reality, music, screen saver sounds, and more, a considerable amount of possible work is still untouched. The aim of this study is to summarize the literature on audio textures, textural features, and their applications. In this survey, the texture synthesis and features are explained in detail.

Agent-Based Music Live Coding: Sonic adventures in 2D

“…In this sense, linear crossfading between wavetables could be seen as a nice addition, rather than a significant departure from wavetable synthesis. Wave terrain synthesis (Mitsuhashi 1982) extended the idea of a one-dimensional wavetable to two dimensions. While wavetable synthesis can be used with waveforms inspired by physical instruments, wave terrain synthesis is a more abstract technique, as there is no direct interpretation of the terrain in terms of physical sound production.…”

The State of the Art in Procedural Audio

“…Notably, this review paper highlighted a lack of evaluation in the field. A more recent review was provided in [13], using the alternative term audio textures, giving a history of the field, and discussing analysis methods and applications, in addition to synthesis.…”