HOW TO MAKE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE RECOGNISE THE SOUNDS THAT CONTRIBUTE TO SOUNDSCAPE

Dick Botteldooren; Tomasz Grzywalski; Zhongju Yuan

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Complete Paper

Summary

Paper Title

HOW TO MAKE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE RECOGNISE THE SOUNDS THAT CONTRIBUTE TO SOUNDSCAPE

Authors

Dick Botteldooren
Tomasz Grzywalski
Zhongju Yuan

Modality

Onsite-Oral

Subject area

15.0. Soundscape: General

Publishing Date

25/09/2025

Country of Publishing

Brazil | Brasil

Language of Publishing

Inglês

Paper Page

https://www.even3.com.br/anais/international-congress-exposition-noise-control-engineering/1075802-how-to-make-artificial-intelligence-recognise-the-sounds-that-contribute-to-soundscape

ISBN

978-65-272-1573-8

Keywords

soundscape, salience, sound recognition, artificial intelligence

Summary

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly adept at recognising sounds and acoustic scenes, and generative AI can create meaningful narratives about them. However, in everyday environments, humans do not notice or pay attention to all sounds. This selective attention reflects nature’s strategy to avoid overloading the energy-expensive human cognitive system. The biological mechanism of focusing on relevant sounds while filtering out irrelevant or repetitive stimuli is not well-matched in most current AI systems. Sounds stand out in the sonic environment due to their salience. A sound can be salient because of its (1) acoustic characteristics such as loudness, sharpness, and tonality; (2) semantic incongruity or unexpectedness; or (3) special meaning to an individual or society. Prior work focused on the first form of salience and integrated it into artificial soundscape analysis. Here, we report primarily on the latter forms. We identify sounds that would typically be recognised as foreground, salient sounds by a person. A processing layer is then added to the sound recognition system to identify these salient sounds and further process them into soundscape perception, thereby creating context awareness in the AI.

Title of the Event: Inter-Noise 2025
City of the Event: São Paulo
Title of the Proceedings of the event: Proceedings of the 54th International Congress and Exposition on Noise Control Engineering
Name of the Publisher: Even3
Means of Dissemination: Meio Digital

How to cite

BOTTELDOOREN, Dick; GRZYWALSKI, Tomasz; YUAN, Zhongju. HOW TO MAKE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE RECOGNISE THE SOUNDS THAT CONTRIBUTE TO SOUNDSCAPE.. In: Proceedings of the 54th International Congress and Exposition on Noise Control Engineering. Anais...Sao Paulo(SP) WTC Events Center, 2025. Available in: https//www.even3.com.br/anais/international-congress-exposition-noise-control-engineering/1075802-HOW-TO-MAKE-ARTIFICIAL-INTELLIGENCE-RECOGNISE-THE-SOUNDS-THAT-CONTRIBUTE-TO-SOUNDSCAPE. Access in: 07/01/2026