SyncLabeling: A Synchronized Audio Segmentation Interface for Mobile Devices

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Manual audio segmentation is a time-consuming process, especially when there is more than one sound playing simultaneously that needs to be segmented and annotated (e.g., target and background sounds). In conventional audio annotation interfaces, users need to repeatedly pause and replay the audio to complete an overlap segmentation task, which is very inefficient. In this paper, we propose “SyncLabeling,” a synchronized audio segmentation interface for smartphones that allows users to segment and annotate two overlapping sounds in a single audio stream at a time using a game-like labeling interface on mobile devices. We conducted a user study to compare the proposed SyncLabeling interface with a conventional audio annotation interface on four types of audio segmentation tasks. The results showed that the proposed interface is much more efficient than the conventional interface (2.4× faster) under comparable annotation accuracy in most tasks. In addition, more than half of the participants enjoyed using the proposed SyncLabeling interface and showed willingness to use it.