Estimation of the Perceived Time of Presence of Sources in Urban Acoustic Environments Using Deep Learning Techniques

The impact of urban sound on human beings has often been studied from a negative point of view (noise pollution). In the two last decades, the interest of studying its positive impact has been revealed with the soundscape approach (resourcing spaces). The literature shows that the recognition of sources plays a great role in the way humans are affected by sound environments. There is thus a need for characterizing urban acoustic environments not only with sound pressure measurements but also with source-specific attributes such as their perceived time of presence, dominance or volume. This paper demonstrates, on a controlled dataset, that machine learning techniques based on state of the art neural architectures can predict the perceived time of presence of several sound sources at a sufficient accuracy. To validate this assertion, a corpus of simulated sound scenes is first designed. Perceptual attributes corresponding to those stimuli are gathered through a listening experiment. From the contributions of the individual sound sources available for the simulated corpus, a physical indicator approximating the perceived time of presence of sources is computed and used to train and evaluate a multi-label source detection model. This model predicts the presence of simultaneously active sources from fast third octave spectra, allowing the estimation of perceptual attributes such as pleasantness in urban sound environments at a sufficient degree of precision.