Computationally Created Soundscapes with Audio Metaphor

Soundscape composition is the creative practice of processing and combining sound recordings to evoke auditory associations and memories within a listener. We present Audio Metaphor, a system for creating novel soundscape compositions. Audio Metaphor processes natural language queries derived from Twitter for retrieving semantically linked sound recordings from online user-contributed audio databases. We used a simple natural language processing to create audio file search queries, and we segmented and classified audio files based on general soundscape composition categories. We used our prototype implementation of Audio Metaphor in two performances, seeding the system with keywords of current relevance, and found that the system produced a soundscape that reflected Twitter activity and kept audiences engaged for more than an hour.