Probably pleasant? A neural-probabilistic approach to automatic masker selection for urban soundscape augmentation

Soundscape augmentation, which involves the addition of sounds known as “maskers” to a given soundscape, is a human-centric urban noise mitigation measure aimed at improving the overall soundscape quality. However, the choice of maskers is often predicated on laborious processes and is inflexible to...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Ooi, Kenenth, Watcharasupat, Karn N., Lam, Bhan, Ong, Zhen-Ting, Gan, Woon-Seng
Other Authors: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Format: Conference or Workshop Item
Language:English
Published: 2022
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Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/10356/158000
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Institution: Nanyang Technological University
Language: English
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Summary:Soundscape augmentation, which involves the addition of sounds known as “maskers” to a given soundscape, is a human-centric urban noise mitigation measure aimed at improving the overall soundscape quality. However, the choice of maskers is often predicated on laborious processes and is inflexible to the time-varying nature of real-world soundscapes. Owing to the perceptual uniqueness of each soundscape and the inherent subjectiveness of human perception, we propose a probabilistic perceptual attribute predictor (PPAP) that predicts parameters of random distributions as outputs instead of a single deterministic value. Using the PPAP, we developed a novel automatic masker selection system (AMSS), which selects optimal masker candidates based on the predicted distribution of the ISO 12913-3 Pleasantness score for a given soundscape. Via a large-scale listening test with 300 participants, we collected 12600 subjective responses, each to a unique augmented soundscape, to train the PPAP models in a 5-fold cross-validation scheme. Using a convolutional recurrent neural network backbone and experimenting with several variants of the attention mechanism for the PPAP, we evaluated the proposed system on a blind test set with 48 unseen augmented soundscapes to assess the effectiveness of the probabilistic output scheme over traditional deterministic systems.