Audio Metaphor

Audio Metaphor is an interactive system that presents itself as a search engine in which the audience is invited to enter an expression or a sentence that will serve as a request to an automatic soundscape generation system. Enter “The waterfalls inundate the city” or “The marshmallows explode in the campfire” and it will sound like it in quadraphonic! This interactive audio installation is questioning the ubiquity of information, be it real or fake, actual or synthetic. Using state of the art algorithms for sound retrieval, segmentation, background and foreground classification, automatic mixing and automatic soundscape affect recognition, Audio Metaphor is a powerful system that generates believable soundscape at interactive rate. The piece points at issues around big data, artificial intelligence, machine learning and other technoscientific advances, and their impact on our perception and experience of the world. Audio Metaphor’s database makes use of sounds recorded and uploaded by the online community of Freesound.