Quality Audio Prototyping: a prototype system for unified sound retrieval and procedural generation
For sound designers, this prototype addresses the disconnect between library search and procedural synthesis, but the evaluation is preliminary and the novelty is incremental.
QuAP unifies sound retrieval and procedural generation in one interface, reducing workflow fragmentation. User evaluation with 16 practitioners confirmed workflow utility, and subjective tests showed significant quality improvements in 5 of 6 synthesis models.
Sound design workflows frequently oscillate between time-consuming library searches and the complexity of procedural synthesis, with practitioners typically relying on disconnected tools to address each challenge separately. This paper introduces Quality Audio Prototyping (QuAP), a working prototype that unifies content-based audio retrieval and procedural sound generation within a single interface, reducing the procedural distance between a narrative concept and its sonic realisation. QuAP integrates a similarity-based retrieval engine with real-time procedural audio models, complemented by a rule-based assistant that provides perceptually informed parameter guidance, offering definitions and recommendations derived from empirical optimisation rather than requiring prior synthesis knowledge. Preliminary evaluation confirms the viability of this approach: subjective assessment demonstrated statistically significant quality improvements in five of six embedded synthesis models, and an encoder ablation study established the preferred retrieval architecture on a sound effect dataset. A user evaluation with 16 practitioners confirmed the tool's workflow utility, with all participants agreeing that the parameter assistant preserved creative agency while lowering the barrier to procedural interaction.