Audio mining
Encyclopedia
Audio mining is a technique by which the content of an audio signal can be automatically analysed and searched. It is most commonly used in the field of automatic speech recognition
, where the analysis tries to identify any speech within the audio. The audio will typically be processed by a speech recognition system in order to identify word or phoneme
units that are likely to occur in the spoken content. This information may either be used immediately in pre-defined searches for keywords or phrases (a real-time "word spotting" system), or the output of the speech recogniser may be stored in an index file. One or more audio mining index files can then be loaded at a later date in order to run searches for keywords or phrases.
The results of a search will normally be in terms of hits, which are regions within files that are good matches for the chosen keywords. The user may then be able to listen to the audio corresponding to these hits in order to verify if a correct match was found.
Audio mining systems used in the field of speech recognition are often divided into two groups: those that use Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognisers (LVCSR) and those that use phonetic recognition.
Musical audio mining (also known as Music information retrieval
) relates to the identification of perceptually important characteristics of a piece of music such as melodic, harmonic or rhythmic structure. Searches can then be carried out to find pieces of music that are similar in terms of their melodic, harmonic and/or rhythmic characteristics.
Speech recognition
Speech recognition converts spoken words to text. The term "voice recognition" is sometimes used to refer to recognition systems that must be trained to a particular speaker—as is the case for most desktop recognition software...
, where the analysis tries to identify any speech within the audio. The audio will typically be processed by a speech recognition system in order to identify word or phoneme
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
units that are likely to occur in the spoken content. This information may either be used immediately in pre-defined searches for keywords or phrases (a real-time "word spotting" system), or the output of the speech recogniser may be stored in an index file. One or more audio mining index files can then be loaded at a later date in order to run searches for keywords or phrases.
The results of a search will normally be in terms of hits, which are regions within files that are good matches for the chosen keywords. The user may then be able to listen to the audio corresponding to these hits in order to verify if a correct match was found.
Audio mining systems used in the field of speech recognition are often divided into two groups: those that use Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognisers (LVCSR) and those that use phonetic recognition.
Musical audio mining (also known as Music information retrieval
Music information retrieval
Music information retrieval is the interdisciplinary science of retrieving information from music. MIR is a small but growing field of research with many real-world applications...
) relates to the identification of perceptually important characteristics of a piece of music such as melodic, harmonic or rhythmic structure. Searches can then be carried out to find pieces of music that are similar in terms of their melodic, harmonic and/or rhythmic characteristics.