Authoring augmented soundscapes with user-contributed content

Augmented reality audio is an area still not sufficiently explored. In this article we address the creation of soundscapes to augment the acoustic information in a physical location. In particular, we focus on authoring tools that make use of user-contributed content. To facilitate the authoring process, our tool integrates the access to Freesound.org, an online repository with more than 120,000 sounds under a Creative Commons license. The sound search combines the traditional text-query with content-based audio classification. The automatic classification allows searching according to a taxonomy of environmental sounds (e.g. drip, impact, wind, etc.). Finally, we implemented a complete augmented soundscapes system that , in an autonomous and continuous manner, spatializes virtual acoustic sources in a geographic location.