Dear Auditory list: Announcing a Foley synthesis challenge! It's a new part of the IEEE AASP Challenge on Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (Task 7 of DCASE). Call for entries is open, with a deadline of 15 May 2023. https://dcase.community/challenge2023/task-foley-sound-synthesis This task aims to build a Foley sound synthesis system that can generate plausible audio signals fitting into given categories of sound. Foley sound, in general, refers to sound effects that are created to convey (and sometimes enhance) the sounds produced by events occurring in a narrative (e.g. radio or film). Foley sounds are commonly added to multimedia to enhance the perceptual audio experience. This sound synthesis challenge requires the generation of original audio clips that represent a category of sound, such as footsteps. The new sounds should fit into the category that is typified by the set of sounds in the development set, yet they should not duplicate any of the provided sounds. Any synthesis approach is permitted (not just machine learning). Why is this an important goal? First, time-consuming post-production is inevitable to obtain a perfectly matched sound effect. By generating sound that belongs to a target sound category, Foley sound synthesis can make the workflow much more time and cost-effective. With the rise of virtual environments such as the metaverse, we expect a growing need for the automated generation of more and more complex and creative sound environments. Second, it can be utilized for dataset synthesis or augmentation for a wide variety of DCASE tasks including sound event detection (SED). SED has drawn great attention and synthesized datasets have been used already, e.g., URBAN-SED dataset. A high-quality Foley sound synthesis model could lead to development of better SED models. There are 7 categories of sound events to be synthesized. The challenge has two subproblems: the development of models with and without external resources. Participants are expected to submit a system for one of the two problems, and each problem is evaluated independently. Submissions will be evaluated by Frechet Audio Distance (FAD), followed by a subjective test. #foleysynthesischallenge Foley Challenge Organizers: Keunwoo Choi, Gaudio Lab, Inc.; Korea Jaekwon Im, Gaudio Lab, Inc., KAIST; Korea Laurie M. Heller, Carnegie Mellon University; USA Keisuke Imoto, Doshisha University; Japan Mathieu Lagrange, CNRS, Ecole Centrale Nantes, Nantes University; France Brian McFee, New York University; USA Yuki Okamoto, Ritsumeikan University; Japan Shinnosuke Takamichi, The University of Tokyo; Japan |