TAPESTREA : Techniques And Paradigms for Expressive Synthesis, Transformation, and Rendering of Environmental Audio
http://taps.cs.princeton.edu/

what is it? : TAPESTREA (or taps) is a unified framework for interactively analyzing, transforming and synthesizing complex sounds. Given one or more recordings, it provides well-defined means to:

# identify points of interest in the sound and extract them into reusable templates
# transform sound components independently of the background and/or other events
# continually resynthesize the background texture in a perceptually convincing manner
# controllably place event templates over backgrounds, using a novel graphical user interface and/or scripts written in the ChucK audio programming language
# leverage similarity based retrieval to locate other interesting sound components

Taps provides a new way to completely transform a sound scene, dynamically generate soundscapes of unlimited length, and compose and design sound by combining elements from different recordings. Tailored for sound designers, audio researchers, composers, and anyone interested in experimenting with sound.