Automatic morphological description of sounds

Morphological description of sound has been proposed by Pierre Schaeffer. Part of this description consists in describing a sound by identifying the temporal evolution of its acoustical properties to a set of descriptors. This kind of description is especially useful for indexing sounds with unknown cause such as SoundFX. The present work deals with the automatic estimation of these morphological descriptions from audio signal analysis. In this work, three morphological descriptions are considered: - dynamic profiles (ascending, descending, ascending/descending, stable, impulsive), - grain/ iteration profiles, - melodic profiles (up, down, fixed, up/ down, down/ up). For each case we present the most appropriate audio features and mapping algorithm used to automatically estimate these profiles. We demonstrate the use of these descriptions for automatic indexing and search-by-similarity.