Good-sounds.org: A framework to explore goodness in instrumental sounds

Abstract

We introduce good-sounds.org, a community driven framework based on freesound.org to explore the concept of goodness in instrumental sounds. Goodness is considered here as the common agreed basic sound quality of an instrument without taking into consideration musical expressiveness. Musicians upload their sounds and vote on existing sounds, and from the collected data the system is able to develop sound goodness measures of relevance for music education applications. The core of the system is a database of sounds, together with audio features extracted from them using MTG’s Essentia library and user annotations related to the goodness of the sounds. The web frontend provides useful data visualizations of the sound attributes and tools to facilitate user interaction. To evaluate the framework, we carried out an experiment to rate sound goodness of single notes of nine orchestral instruments. In it, users rated the sounds using an AB vote over a set of sound attributes defined to be of relevance in the characterization of single notes of instrumental sounds. With the obtained votes we built a ranking of the sounds for each attribute and developed a model that rates the goodness for each of the selected sound attributes. Using this approach, we have succeeded in obtaining results comparable to a model that was built from expert generated evaluations.