Automatic Sound Identification based on Prosodic Listening

This paper presents a system for the identification of vocal and vocal-like sounds by means of a classificatory scheme based upon their prosodic attributes. The system firstly segments examples of the sound classes in question and performs a number of analyses on these segments in order to determine their prosodic attributes. Then, it builds a classificatory scheme, which will be used to identify an unknown sound. For example, consider the identification of the language of utterances spoken in English, French and Japanese. In this case, the system establishes a classificatory scheme from samples of speech in these three languages. Then, the system infers the language of unknown utterances by matching their prosodic information with the classificatory scheme. The system is not, however, limited to language identification tasks; it also can identify singing styles and a number of animal calls. Given the appropriate training data, the system is able to identify such sounds with great accuracy.