Sirens is a library for segmentation, indexing, and retrieval of environmental and natural sounds. Sirens is currently under development and at the moment is only ready to use for feature extraction, segmentation, and comparison as per Wichern, et al. below. Check back later for updates.

Sirens is being developed simultaneously with sirens-vamp, an implementation of the feature extraction routines as Vamp plugins.

Any application using Sirens also needs to link against FFTW and pthread:

g++ myproject.cpp -lsirens -lfftw3 -lpthread

Sirens relies on FFTW and SCons. To install, perform the following command in the project's directory:

sudo scons install

To build the applications in the examples/ directory, do

scons

If you do not have root access, you may have troubles installing Sirens. In this case, you can put the library in a custom directory. For example, to put the library in ~/lib and the includes in ~/include/sirens:

scons install --prefix=$HOME

Additionally, if you need to point the Sirens install to a specific directory to find FFTW headers, you can specify any additional parameters to the compiler using $CFLAGS and $LDFLAGS. For example, to use ~/include/fftw3.h, ~/lib/fftw3.a, and so on:

export CFLAGS=-I$HOME/include
export LDFLAGS=-L$HOME/lib
scons install --prefix=$HOME

Eventually. See the examples/ directory for some ideas.

There are a number of tasks planned for improving Sirens. See TODO.markdown.

Sirens is based off research within the Arts, Media and Engineering program at Arizona State University. Additionally, work on Sirens is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants NSF IGERT DGE-05-04647 and NSF CISE Research Infrastructure 04-03428. For more information, the following paper may be of interest:

G. Wichern, J. Xue, H. Thornburg, B. Mechtley, and A. Spanias, Segmentation, indexing, and retrieval for environmental and natural sounds, IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 688-707, 2010.

Copyright 2009-2012 Arizona State University. Sirens is licensed under the GNU LGPL. See COPYING.LESSER for details. If you would like to use Sirens for a commercial application or have other difficulties with its licensing restrictions, please contact Brandon Hawley on Github.