SBIR Phase II:Sound-object Recognition for Real-time or Offline Systems

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project includes research and development of audio recognition and analysis software for offline and real-time sound recognition. Musicians and audio engineers have access to terabytes of music loops and sound effects. However, musicians are limited to searching for sounds using text-only keyword searches. This is a mundane, inaccurate, and exhausting process that ignores the files' actual audio content. The proposed solution provides a unique "find-something-that-sounds-like-this" search engine. Media production software and hardware is too complex, tedious, and labor-intensive for both novice and advanced users. The proposed sound platform adds capability that was previously missing - recognizing an input sound and automatically choosing the best parameters for the user. This project uses a signal processing and machine learning platform to perform novel experiments for classifying audio streams in real-time, improving recognition accuracy, and retrieving sounds from large collections. Commercial-quality software development kits for offline and real-time sound recognition will be developed. This project integrates state-of-the-art machine learning, digital signal processing, and information retrieval techniques. If successful, the platform will be able to listen to an audio signal and understand what it is listening to - as human listeners can identify and classify sounds. This innovative technology will be licensed to audio and music technology software and hardware manufacturers. The platform is suited for long-term discoveries and innovation, with demonstrated commercial interest from biomedical signal processing, security/surveillance, and interactive gaming companies. In the first chosen market, (sound engineering) the platform will have direct cultural benefits for musicians, music hobbyists, and audio engineers. It will allow music creation and audio production to become a completely creative task - minimizing the tedious technical issues that hinder the creative process, and lowering the barriers to entry for novice musicians and creative professionals.