Sound-environment monitoring technique based on computational auditory scene analysis

Monitoring techniques are a key technology for examining conditions in various scenarios (e.g., structural and weather conditions and disasters). The appropriate extraction of the features of these scenarios from observation data is important in understanding them. This study proposes a monitoring technique that allows sound environments to be expressed as a sound pattern. To this end, the concept of synesthesia is exploited. The keys, tones, and pitches of the monitored sound are expressed using the three elements of color, namely hue, saturation, and brightness, respectively. The hue, saturation, and brightness are assumed herein to be detected from the chromagram, sonogram, and sound spectrogram, respectively, based on a previous synesthesia experiment. The sound pattern can then be drawn using color, yielding a "painted sound map." The usefulness of the proposed monitoring technique is verified using environmental sound data observed at a galleria.