Audio Textures: Theory and Applications

In this paper, we introduce a new audio medium, called audio texture, as a means of synthesizing long audio stream according to a given short example audio clip. The example clip is first analyzed to extract its basic building patterns. An audio stream of arbitrary length is then synthesized using a sequence of extracted building patterns. The patterns can be varied in the synthesis process to add variations to the generated sound to avoid simple repetition. Audio textures are useful in applications such as background music, lullabies, game music, and screen saver sounds. We also extend this idea to audio texture restoration, or constrained audio texture synthesis for restoring the missing part in an audio clip. It is also useful in many applications such as error concealment for audio/music delivery with packets loss on the Internet. Novel methods are proposed for unconstrained and constrained audio texture synthesis. Preliminary results are provided for evaluation.