METHOD AND ARTICLE OF MANUFACTURE FOR CONTENT-BASED ANALYSIS, STORAGE, RETRIEVAL, AND SEGMENTATION OF AUDIO INFORMATION

A system that performs analysis and comparison of audio data files based upon the content of the data files is presented. The analysis of the audio data produces a set of numeric values (a feature vector) that can be used to classify and rank the similarity between individual audio files typically stored in a multimedia database or on the World Wide Web. The analysis also facilitates the description of user-defined classes of audio files, based on an analysis of a set of audio files that are members of a user-defined class. The system can find sounds within a longer sound, allowing an audio recording to be automatically segmented into a series of shorter audio segments.