t-SNE Sound Browser

Year: 2017

Client: Easter Island Productions, Los Angeles, CA

Technology: openFrameworks, Librosa, constant-Q transform, t-SNE, audio feature visualization

Description

Prototype interface for searching roughly 30,000 short drum samples by arranging audio features into a navigable two-dimensional t-SNE map.

The system analyzed the first second of each sample with Librosa’s constant-Q transform, reduced 924-dimensional feature vectors into a spatial layout, and used position and color to make large sound libraries browsable by similarity.