20. The computer system of claim 13 , wherein the modeling module incorporates at least one speech model.
13. A computer system to enable environmental recognition of audio input comprising: a feature selection module ranking a plurality of audio descriptors and selecting a configurable number of audio descriptors from the ranked audio descriptors to obtain a feature set; a feature extraction module extracting the feature set obtained by the feature selection module and appending the feature set with a set of frequency scale information approximating sensitivity of the human ear; and a modeling module applying the combined feature set to at least one audio input to determine a background environment.