An extensible Web tool for the collection, sharing, and annotation of audio documents

Abstract

The growth of the World Wide Web has been accompanied by a proliferation of rich, time-based media such as audio and video documents. However, the ability to categorize and index these documents has not improved comparably, a limitation for humans and machines alike to browsing, retrieving, and making sense of them. Motivated by a need to collect and annote natural sounds, this thesis proposes a web-based audio annotation system and describes its design and implementation. Users upload audio using a browser or via cell phone stream, and add timed annotations in the form of comments, tags, or metadata. Plug-ins allow custom scripts to parse metadata and add functionality to the user interface. Finally, applications in the fields of environmental monitoring, oral histories, and music performance and analysis are described. In particular, the flexibility of cell phones and adaptability of plug-ins makes the system applicable to other disciplines and is the main contribution of this work.