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The current paper focuses on the development of an enhanced Mobile Journalism (MoJo) model for soundscape heritage crowdsourcing, data-driven storytelling, and management in the era of big data and the semantic web. Soundscapes and environmental sound semantics have a great impact on cultural heritage, also affecting the quality of human life, from multiple perspectives. In this view, context- and location-aware mobile services can be combined with state-of-the-art machine and deep learning approaches to offer multilevel semantic analysis monitoring of sound-related heritage. The targeted utilities can offer new insights toward sustainable growth of both urban and rural areas. Much emphasis is also put on the multimodal preservation and auralization of special soundscape areas and open ancient theaters with remarkable acoustic behavior, representing important cultural artifacts. For this purpose, a pervasive computing architecture is deployed and investigated, utilizing both client- and cloud-wise semantic analysis services, to implement and evaluate the envisioned MoJo methodology. Elaborating on previous/baseline MoJo tools, research hypotheses and questions are stated and put to test as part of the human-centered application design and development process. In this setting, primary algorithmic backend services on sound semantics are implemented and thoroughly validated, providing a convincing proof of concept of the proposed model.

In this study, we aim to learn highly descriptive representations for a wide set of machinery sounds and exploit this knowledge to perform condition monitoring of mechanical equipment. We propose a comprehensive feature learning approach that operates on raw audio, by supervising the formation of salient audio embeddings in latent states of a deep temporal convolutional neural network. By fusing the supervised feature learning approach with an unsupervised deep one-class neural network, we are able to model the characteristics of each source and implicitly detect anomalies in different operational states of industrial machines. Moreover, we enable the exploitation of spatial audio information in the learning process, by formulating a novel front-end processing strategy for circular microphone arrays. Experimental results on the MIMII dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, reaching a state-of-the-art mean AUC score of 91.0%. Anomaly detection performance is significantly improved by incorporating multi-channel audio data in the feature extraction process, as well as training the convolutional neural network on the spatially invariant front-end. Finally, the proposed semi-supervised approach allows the concise modeling of normal machine conditions and accurately detects system anomalies, compared to existing anomaly detection methods.

Perceptually motivated audio signal processing and feature extraction have played a key role in the determination of high-level semantic processes and the development of emerging systems and applications, such as mobile phone telecommunication and hearing aids. In the era of deep learning, speech enhancement methods based on neural networks have seen great success, mainly operating on the log-power spectra. Although these approaches surpass the need for exhaustive feature extraction and selection, it is still unclear whether they target the important sound characteristics related to speech perception. In this study, we propose a novel set of auditory-motivated features for single-channel speech enhancement by fusing temporal envelope and temporal fine structure information in the context of vocoder-like processing. A causal gated recurrent unit (GRU) neural network is employed to recover the low-frequency amplitude modulations of speech. Experimental results indicate that the exploited system achieves considerable gains for normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners, in terms of objective intelligibility and quality metrics. The proposed auditory-motivated feature set achieved better objective intelligibility results compared to the conventional log-magnitude spectrogram features, while mixed results were observed for simulated listeners with hearing loss. Finally, we demonstrate that the proposed analysis/synthesis framework provides satisfactory reconstruction accuracy of speech signals.

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