Mscaper

The large and growing archives of audio content on the web have been transforming the sound design practice. In this context, sampling – a fundamental sound design tool – has shifted from mechanical recording to the realms of the copying and cutting on the computer. To effectively browse these large archives and retrieve content became a well-identified problem in Music Information Retrieval, namely through the adoption of audio content-based methodologies.

MScaper is a semantically-oriented application for browsing and retrieving audio content, in particular, environmental sounds, from Freesound. We aimed to streamline the retrieval of user-defined queries to foster a fluid generation of soundscapes. Russel’s circumplex model, namely the description of affect based on the combination of valence and arousal dimensions, is adopted to filter textual soundscapes queries from Freesound.