Crowd-Sourcing the Sounds of Places with a Web-Based Evolutionary Algorithm

Citation

Brownlee AEI, Kim S, Wang S, Chan S & Lawson JA (2019) Crowd-Sourcing the Sounds of Places with a Web-Based Evolutionary Algorithm. In: GECCO '19: Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion. GECCO 2019: The Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, Prague, Czech Republic, 13.07.2019-17.07.2019. New York: ACM, pp. 131-132. https://doi.org/10.1145/3319619.3322028

Abstract
The sounds we associate with particular places are tightly interwoven with our memories and sense of belonging. We describe a platform designed to assist in gathering the sounds a group of people associate with a place. A web-based evolutionary algorithm, with human-in-the-loop fitness evaluations, ranks and recombines sounds to find collections that the group rates as familiar. An experiment covering four geographical locations shows that the process does indeed find sounds deemed familiar by participants.

Keywords
sound; soundscapes; human-in-the-loop; mood

People

Dr Sandy Brownlee

Senior Lecturer in Computing Science, Computing Science and Mathematics - Division