Title: Film audio pace

Authors: Simon Moncrieff, Svetha Venkatesh

Addresses: Department of Computing, Curtin University of Technology, GPO Box U1987, Perth,WA, Australia. ' Department of Computing, Curtin University of Technology, GPO Box U1987, Perth,WA, Australia

Abstract: We explore the concept of film pace expressed through audio to analyse the film at a semantic level. We use domain knowledge to derive a number of measures for film audio pace. We then apply the audio pace to examine two semantic concepts: counterpoint and narrative structure. Counterpoint is a method used to highlight a salient event by contrasting the visual and audio aspects of a film. We divide narrative structure into visual narration, action, and audio narration, plot development. We hypothesise that changes in the narrative structure signal a change in the audio pace. We then test this hypothesis using eight films of varying genres. A pattern was established linking the audio pace features, guided by the properties of the audio energy, to the narrative structure. The method was successful in determining the narrative structure for seven of the films, achieving an overall precision of 76.4% and recall of 80.3%.

Keywords: multimedia content analysis; film audio; film pace; semantics; counterpoint; narrative structure; visual narration; action; audio narration; plot development; audio pace; pattern recognition.

DOI: 10.1504/IJISTA.2007.014265

International Journal of Intelligent Systems Technologies and Applications, 2007 Vol.3 No.3/4, pp.296 - 308

Published online: 28 Jun 2007 *

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