THE PROJECT
The Sound Search Project is a content-based search engine for sound effects.
Blackbird Interactive (BBI) is an independent game development studio founded in 2010 in Vancouver, British Columbia. Sound engineering for video games is complex and dynamic. BBI maintains a large audio sample collection to create sound effects that fit the tone and environment of dynamic actions in their games. Current sound search methods at BBI are limited to filtering results based on existing metadata embedded in the files. However, some audio sample collections are poorly documented. Under the fast-moving audio production process, the sound designers are unable to access these samples via keyword search, and thus those samples can be overlooked in the design process.
With the aspiration to accelerate the creative process of mixing and utilizing sound effects, BBI is collaborating with the team to improve and facilitate their existing sound search mechanisms. Sound designers at BBI can search the sound effect database for a close match with an input sound, instead of relying on previously supplied metadata. The application takes an input sound of any length, and analyses it to extract its most important features. It then searches through a database of pre-processed sound files, and returns results regardless of where in the database they were originally located, or the metadata associated with them.
The Team
Our team consists of five students in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at the University of British Columbia: Heather Mitchell, Micaela Peragallo, Alisher Yusupov, David Zhang, and myself. The Capstone Team has an interest in sound engineering and varied technical and non-technical experience applied throughout the project.
My Contributions
The Capstone project is split into four milestones: Proposal, Design Review I, Design Review II, and Product Review.
During the Design Review I stage, I researched potential search algorithms and front-end Python solutions. I also developed a low-fidelity prototype based on the list of requirements using Adobe XD.
During the Design Review II stage, I was responsible for building the front-end of the application using Kivy.
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In the Product Reivew Stage, I worked closely with the back-end group to integrate the final product. I also produced the product review video.
Watch the Featurette below!