‘All possible sounds’: speech, music, and the emergence of machine listening

Abstract

‘Machine listening’ is one common term for a fast-growing interdisciplinary field of science and engineering that ‘uses signal processing and machine learning to extract useful information from sound’. This article contributes to the critical literature on machine listening by presenting some of its history as a field. From the 1940s to the 1990s, work on artificial intelligence and audio developed along two streams. There was work on speech recognition/understanding, and work in computer music. In the early 1990s, another stream began to emerge. At institutions such as MIT Media Lab and Stanford’s CCRMA, researchers started turning towards ‘more fundamental problems of audition’. Propelled ..