Mitchell wants to change that. "What we're working on is a new field of AI that we call artificial audio intelligence,” says Mitchell. “It’s not something that has been tackled before in any meaningful sense."

Audio Analytic is part of a new wave of companies training machine learning systems to spot patterns in sounds. Uberchord, based in Berlin, is developing an AI that can help people learn to play guitar. It listens to you strum and tells you when you have your fingering wrong. Uberchord is one of several AI companies working with sound that Abbey Road Studios – one-time recording home of the Beatles – is investing in.

Another company, Cambridge Consultants, has taught an AI to recognise different genres of piano music, like ragtime or baroque. The system, called Aficionado, was trained on just a few hundred hours of piano playing, including both professional recordings and amateur practice videos taken from YouTube. The training data was deliberately patchy, says Monty Barlow at Cambridge Consultants. “We were challenging the AI to handle the near infinite complexity of live music.”

Aficionado’s musical chops are not just for show, however. Training the system on music – and getting it to ignore irrelevant factors such as tempo, volume or tone – turns out to be a good way to teach it to spot patterns in complex data in general, whatever it represents. Aficionado’s first task will be to identify faults in telecommunications networks.