Page 17 - E- book 33_Neat

In terms of audio searching development, there is company based out of Grass Valley,

California that is currently doing some developmental work in searching audio based on

content rather than text description. This company is called Comparisons and their new

technology was debuted at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention in

April of 1998. Essentially, the way the system works is by having the user initiate a sound-

matching query either by using a sound synthesizer or by simply speaking into a microphone.

Then, "the digital audio content is first characterized by an automated indexing process. Then

any sound can be used to find matches in the indexed collection. The given sound, called

a prototype, is compared automatically with each sound in the collection. The degree of

similarity between two sounds is indicated by a similarity score that ranges from 0 to 100."

The results with the highest similarity scores are displayed to the user. This technology is said

to work for all types of sounds including people, animals, machinery, and musical instruments.