Sound Ontologies. Methods and Approaches for the Description of Sound

Categorizing and classifying sounds is a useful tool to organize a palette for sound designers and composers. If doing this for acoustic and tradi tional instruments is a relatively well established task, e.g. Von Hornbostel and Sachs (1961 ), the same cannot be said for any sound in general. With sounds that are not originated by traditional instruments (or even produced by using traditional instruments in nontraditional ways), we might lack the same rigorous set of criteria, e.g. the originating mechanism: vibrating strings or resonating membranes. For this reason, employing the same classification rules will not necessarily lead to the desired outcomes. Categories and ontologies can be used to relax the strict requirements of a formal classifi cation and allow users to organize their personal sonic space. As the color palette prepared by a painter contains only a subset of all the possible colors, the tools that we use to synthesize sounds present us with a limited set of options, so rather than being neutral or agnostic tools, they are contributing in shaping our own creativity. Furthermore, ontological representations of sounds are required in order to support a semantic retrieval of sound resources, as in accessing sounds from a library. Our goal is to present notable attempts in these directions highlighting both the technical/technological substrate and their philosophical approach.