1. A method for performing a sound-recognition operation, comprising: recognizing a sequence of sound primitives in an audio stream, wherein a sound primitive is associated with a semantic label comprising one or more words that describe a sound characterized by the sound primitive; feeding the sequence of sound primitives into a finite-state automaton that recognizes events associated with sequences of sound primitives; and feeding the recognized events into an output system that generates an output associated with the recognized events to be displayed to a user.