Designing sound: Towards a system for designing audio interfaces using timbre spaces

Abstract

The creation of audio interfaces is currently hampered by the difficulty of designing sounds for them. This paper presents a novel system for generating and manipulating non-speech sounds. The system is designed to generate Auditory Icons and Earcons through a common interface. Using a timbre space representation of the sound, it generates output via an FM synthesiser. The timbre space has been compiled in both Fourier and Constant Q Transform versions using Principal Components Analysis (PCA). The design of the system and initial evaluations of these two versions are discussed, showing that the Fourier analysis appears to produce higher quality results, contrary to initial expectations.