BANG, CLICK, THUD, OR WHACK

Acoustic transients-short, impulsive bursts of acoustic energy-are a r ich source of information in the natural world. Biological systems pro cess them quickly and economically. In this article, we describe a bio logically inspired analog very-large-scale integration (VLSI) architec ture for real-time classification of acoustic transients. Judicious no rmalization of time-frequency signals allows an elegant and robust imp lementation of a correlation algorithm. The algorithm replaces analog- analog multiplication with binary multiplexing of analog signals. This removes the need for analog storage and analog multiplication. Simula tions show that the resulting algorithm has the same out-of-sample cla ssification performance (about 93% correct) as a template-matching alg orithm based on conventional analog correlation. This development pave s the way for intelligent acoustic processing in low-power application s such as cellular telephones and debit cards.