Advances of the acoustic navigator for the interactive analysis of psychoacoustic databases and sound engineering

In prior work a novel tool for browsing and analysing large acoustic databases in sound engineering was developed, and called an acoustic navigator. This tool exploits dimensionality reducing mappings and advanced interactive visualisation techniques for navigation and visual exploratory data analysis in acoustic databases. In addition to database projection and display, complementing interactive access to individual sounds and the respective comparison facility is provided. Thus, the analysis of key features for certain acoustical impressions, e.g. richness or pleasance of a sound, can be efficiently identified and consequently used in sound engineering. Further, the available and proven design methods and tools for sound engineering are complemented by interactive facilities in the acoustic navigator. This paper reports on significant novel features and enhancements added to the acoustic navigator, e.g. for interactive sound synthesis and optimisation, which make the tool an attractive candidate as a more general visual data analysis platform, e.g. in medical database analysis.