What do we mean with sound semantics, exactly? A survey of taxonomies and ontologies of everyday sounds

Abstract

Taxonomies and ontologies for the characterization of everyday sounds have been developed in several research fields, including auditory cognition, soundscape research, artificial hearing, sound design, and medicine. Here, we surveyed 36 of such knowledge organization systems, which we identified through a systematic literature search. To evaluate the semantic domains covered by these systems within a homogeneous framework, we introduced a comprehensive set of verbal sound descriptors (sound source properties; attributes of sensation; sound signal descriptors; onomatopoeias; music genres), which we used to manually label the surveyed descriptor classes. We reveal that most taxonomies and ontologies were developed to characterize higher-level semantic relations between sound sources in terms of the sound-generating objects and actions involved (what/how), or in terms of the environmental context (where). This indicates the current lack of a comprehensive ontology of everyday sounds that covers simultaneously all semantic aspects of the relation between sounds. Such an ontology may have a wide range of applications and purposes, ranging from extending our scientific knowledge of auditory processes in the real world, to developing artificial hearing systems.

Bridging Auditory Perception and Natural Language Processing with Semantically informed Deep Neural Networks

“…Nonetheless, Word2Vec outperformed these models, suggesting that natural sound semantics may not require complex contextual information for comprehension. This finding challenges the traditional view of natural sound perception’s semantic complexity, often examined through the lens of language semantics [47]. It suggests that the inherent characteristics of natural sounds, well-captured by Word2Vec’s relatively simple semantic map-ping, may not necessitate the contextual information demanded by language semantics.…”

Semantically-Informed Deep Neural Networks For Sound Recognition

“…Here, we considered word2vec embeddings of the linguistic sound descriptions to retain information on the (linguistic) semantic relations between the sound sources. In the future, the same approach could be extended to different types of semantic embeddings, for example, derived from natural sound ontologies [26].…”

Urban Sound Mapping for Wayfinding – A theoretical Approach and an empirical Study

“…New representational models are required to structure data in various types and forms (Yao et al, 2019). The conceptual frameworks for the description of sounds range from simple sound classifications, to more complex cases such as taxonomies, to highly complex ontologies (Giordano et al, 2022). Taxonomies are arranged in nested, cumulative hierarchies, extending to certain depths (Giordano et al, 2022).…”

“…The conceptual frameworks for the description of sounds range from simple sound classifications, to more complex cases such as taxonomies, to highly complex ontologies (Giordano et al, 2022). Taxonomies are arranged in nested, cumulative hierarchies, extending to certain depths (Giordano et al, 2022). An ontology is a specification of a representational vocabulary for a shared domain of dis-course and defines classes, relations, functions, and other objects (Gruber, 1993).…”

“…Several ontologies have been proposed to represent geospatial data (e.g., Fonseca et al (2000); Couclelis (2019); Daneshfar et al (2022)) also in the field of navigation and wayfinding (Letalle et al, 2020;Sarjakoski et al, 2013;Timpf, 2002;Wang and Issa, 2020). Ontologies and taxonomies for the characterisation of everyday sounds have been developed in several research fields, including auditory cognition, soundscape research, and artificial hearing (Giordano et al, 2022). Gaver (1993) introduced a theoretical framework in the early 1990's that has been very influential for subsequent auditory cognitive research on real-world sound perception (Giordano et al, 2022).…”