Machine Hearing
Machine Hearing, or Machine Listening,
is the use of Machine Learning and audio sensors to derive meaningful information from sound.
This include listening for and diagnosing problems in machinery,
understanding events and activities that cause noise,
and estimation of how humans perceive certain sounds.
Here you can find some notes on the topic compiled by Jon Nordby.

This research is sponsored by Soundsensing,
a provider of IoT audio sensors with built-in Machine Learning, used for Noise Monitoring and Condition Monitoring.
The sensors are ideal for continious monitoring of audible noises and events, and can perform tasks such as
Audio Classification, Audio Event Detection and Acoustic Anomaly Detection.
Their sensors can transmit compressed and privacy-preserving spectrograms, allowing Machine Learning to be done in the cloud using familiar tools like Python.
Or models can be deployed onto the sensor itself, for a highly efficient on-edge ML solution.
Pages
Some information is found in sub-pages.
Recent work
EuroPython 2021: Sound Event Detection with Machine Learning
July 26, 2021.
Presented at EuroPython 2021.
Video recording, slides, notes.
TinyML EMEA 2021: Perfect coffee roasting with TinyML sound sensing
June 7, 2021.
Presented at tinyML EMEA Technical Forum 2021.
Video recording coming, slides, notes.
TinyML Summit 2021: Environmental Sound Classification on microcontrollers
March 25, 2021. Video recording, slides, notes.
Classifying sound using Machine Learning
At KnowIt Oslo, 2020. Video recording, slides, notes
Environmental Sound Classification on Microcontrollers using Convolutional Neural Networks
Master thesis. Report and code available in the Github repository.
EuroPython2019: Audio Classification using Machine Learning
Presentation at EuroPython2019. Video recording, notes
PyCode2019: Recognizing sounds with Machine Learning and Python
Presentation at PyCode Conference 2019 in Gdansk.
Slides,
notes
Video recording. Coming, maybe in November.
SenseCamp2019: Classification of Environmental Sound using IoT sensors
Presentation at SenseCamp 2019 hosted by FORCE Technology Senselab.
Slides: web,
.PDF
NMBU lecture on Audio Classification
Report and lecture at NMBU Data Science.
Report |
Slides
Stack Overflow answers
With example code in Python
Notes
Rough notes on various topics.
Resources
Useful resources to learn more.
Presentations
Books
- Computational Analysis of Sound Scenes and Events. Tuomas Virtanen, Mark D. Plumbley, Dan Ellis. 2018.
- Human and Machine Hearing - Extracting Meaning from Sound. Richard F. Lyon. 2017, revised 2018.
- An Introduction to Audio Content Analysis - Applications in Signal Processing and Music Informatics. Alexander Lerch. 2012.
Companion website: https://www.audiocontentanalysis.org/
- Machine Learning for Audio, Image and Video Analysis: Theory and Applications (Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing). Francesco Camastra,
3 sections. From Perception to Computation, Machine Learning, Applications.
Online courses
Software
Feature extraction
- librosa. The go-to Python module.
- essentia. C++ library, with Python bindings. Lots of Music Analysis extractors. Used by FreeSound and Acousticbrainz.
- kapre. On-demand GPU computation of melspectrograms, for Keras
- torchaudio. Audio processing in PyTorch
Data Augmentation
Lecture notes
- Audio Classification.
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~sgn24006/PDF/L04-audio-classification.pdf
Covers low-level features, MFCC. Classification by distance metrics. GMM. HMM.
- Speech Signal Analysis, Lecture 2.
January 2017, Hiroshi Shimodaira and Steve Renals.
! great diagrams of audio discretization, mel filters, wide versus narrow-band spectrograms.
Competions
- Kaggle Whale detection
- Kaggle FreeSound tagging 2018
- Kaggle FreeSound
- DCASE2014
- DCASE2018
- DCASE2019
- DCASE2020
- DCASE2021
Datasets
Online Communities
- https://mircommunity.slack.com/ - Music Information Retrieval
- The Sound of AI, Slack Community
Lists