MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Sound Business: The Promise of Audio Machine Learning Technologies

Sounds are everywhere — the chatter and babble of humans and animals, the whirring and thrumming of machines, the background hum of the natural environment, and the murmur of bees on a summer day. These sounds provide crucial input to our decision-making, whether as pedestrians crossing the road or as engineers testing the safety of a vehicle or machine.

But until recently, the systematic analysis of sounds in dynamic situations — a busy train station, a shopping mall, or an urban park, for example — has been difficult due to the sheer number of complex acoustic signals interacting at once. But this is now changing, thanks to major advances in sensor technology and deep learning algorithms that can harvest enormous quantities of acoustic input and rapidly extract key information.

About the Author

Mark Purdy (@mjpurdyecon) is managing director of Purdy & Associates, an independent economics and technology research company.

Learn more about MIT SMR.