Method and article of manufacture for content-based analysis, storage, retrieval, and segmentation of audio information

A computer program embodied on a computer-readable medium for analyzing audio files, comprising:

• (a) a code segment for measuring a plurality of acoustical features of a sound file chosen from the group consisting of at least one of loudness, pitch, brightness, bandwidth, and MFCC coefficients thereof;
• (b) a code segment for computing measurements chosen from the group consisting of mean, standard deviation, autocorrelation and first derivative thereof, of the acoustical features of the audio files, forming a vector of the feature and measurements data, and storing the computed measurements and vector in a feature file with a linkage to the audio file;
• and
• (c) a code segment for grouping the feature files based on at least one of (i) similar measurements for the feature files, and (ii) distance between the vector for a sound file and a vector for a reference, to facilitate rapid classification, storage, and/or retrieval of sound files based on a predefined search criteria.

A content based comparison method for segmenting sound files, comprising the steps of:

• (a) measuring a plurality of acoustical features of an sound file chosen from the group consisting of at least one of loudness, pitch, brightness, bandwidth, and MFCC coefficients thereof;
• (b) computing measurements chosen from the group consisting of mean, standard deviation, autocorrelation and first derivative thereof, of the acoustical features of the audio files, forming a vector of the feature and measurements data, and storing the computed measurements and vector in a feature file with a linkage to the audio file;
• and
• (c) segmenting the feature files based on at least one (i) similar measurements for the feature files, and (ii) distance between the vector for a sound file and a vector for a reference, to facilitate rapid classification, storage, and/or retrieval of sound files based on a predefined search criteria.