One aspect of the Good Recording project is to develop algorithms which will be able ‘listen’ to audio and make judgement on the quality.  I thought it would be interesting to have a look into the history of machines which can listen and act upon audio.  This is application area is known as machine audition .  The most well known modern algorithm is that of apple’s speech recognition personality Siri.  But there are other aspect of our lives where machine audition is carried out.  Think of the song identification applications Shazaan and Soundhound.  These applications are great for identifying a song you just heard on the radio.  These devices and algorithms are  sound identifiers or classifiers  where a sound is recorded and then classified, perhaps identified as a particular piece of music or a particular word, or classified as being a particular style of music or language. Continue reading →