Semantic Browsing of Sound Databases without Keywords

摘要

In this paper we study the relevance of a semantic organization of sounds to ease the browsing of a sound database. For such a task semantic access to data is traditionally implemented by a keyword selection process. However, various limitations of written language, such as word polysemy, ambiguities, or translation issues may bias the browsing process. We present and study the efficiency of two sound presentation strategies that organize sounds spatially so as to reflect an underlying semantic hierarchy. For the sake of comparison, we also consider a display whose spatial organization is only based on acoustic cues. Those three displays are evaluated in terms of search speed in a crowdsourcing experiment using two different corpora: the first is composed of environmental sounds from urban environments and the second of sounds produced by musical instruments. Coherent results achieved by considering the two different corpora demonstrate the usefulness of using an implicit semantic organization to display sounds, both in terms of search speed and of learning efficiency.