SsgCaps: A controlled dataset for the evaluation of sound scene generation algorithms

Sound Scene Generation is about the automatic synthesis of artificial sound scenes. We introduce SsgCaps, a publicly available dataset of human-engineered sound scenes wherein each scene matches a precisely structured prompt that guides the sampling process. The corresponding prompts are sampled from a predefined action-based typology that allows extensive sampling while retaining plausibility. SsgCaps is a sound scene dataset derived from the unpublished reference dataset for Task 7 of the 2024 DCASE Challenge edition, which contained private-and public-domain audio samples. In contrast, SsgCaps contains only public-domain audio samples, allowing us to open this dataset to the community. To make this dataset useful to the community, we first elaborate on the rationale for the prompt and dataset structure. We then perform a comparative quantitative analysis of the 2 versions of the dataset. To do so, we compare both versions to the audio synthesized by the SSG algorithms submitted to the challenge using Fr'echet Audio Distance (FAD) and Kernel Audio Distance (KAD) as well as perceptual ratings. This analysis shows only small differences, which enables us to recommend the open version for further benchmarking of SSG algorithms.