Formal description of auditory scenes

This paper introduces the concept called auditory scenes, which is a tool for high semantic description of everyday sounds, and two grammar approaches based on this concept. It does not consider auditory scene analysis, which describes the ability of listeners to separate the acoustic events arriving from different environmental sources into separate perceptual representations (streams). The concept of auditory scenes relies on our everyday perception of sounds in daily life. It assumes various perceptual attributes such as duration, volume, position in space, and others, for each individual sound in the scene as well as the temporal, spatial and other relationships between them. Different temporal relationships and some theoretical considerations regarding these issues are presented in depth. The two grammars represent (1) the hierarchical and (2) the autonomous concept. The first grammar approach is similar to music composition and is basically a temporal composition of everyday sounds. By contrast, the second grammar approach defines the event driven non-hierarchical composition of everyday sounds. Before these grammars are discussed, an introduction to the use of sounds in man-machine interaction and the concept of auditory scenes are presented.