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Following up from the <a href="https://audoo.com/news/blog/audoo-system-architecture">Architecture Overview</a>&nbsp;post, this post goes into more detail on how our Audio Meters securely recognise music whilst respecting the privacy of the venues we're installed in. Given the Audio Meter has microphones front and centre of its design, it's a question we often get asked far too often!
 
Privacy
Hopefully you are familiar with&nbsp;smart speakers such as Amazon Echo, Google Home and the associated technologies&nbsp;built into televisions where you can ask that your lights to be turned on or favourite playlist&nbsp;played. With the convenience of these devices came <a href="https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/alexa-help-me-which-smart-speaker-has-the-best-privacy/">privacy concerns</a> once people realised that&nbsp;the microphones are always listening for voice commands. The speakers typically have&nbsp;a small amount&nbsp;of processing on the speaker that detects the "wake words" (i.e. "Hey Google...", or "Alexa..."), but once those words are detected, the recorded audio is <a href="https://www.techrepublic.com/article/news-amazon-echo-privacy-generative-ai/">typically sent to the vendor's cloud</a> to&nbsp;determine what action to take. As smart speakers are interested in what has been spoken so they can take the appropriate action, they&nbsp;actively work&nbsp;to remove echos, music and other background noise to isolate voice frequencies.
 
Our Audio
 Meters, on the other hand, operate in the opposite way to smart speakers. They are
 not interested in conversations – in fact, conversations can actually get in
 the way of music recognition! We've designed the Audio Meter with privacy at its
 core and as part of that, it actively works to remove conversational noise
 (e.g. think loud talking or singing in a busy bar or restaurant) to get to the
 underlying music.
 
The Audio Meter also does
 not continuously use the microphones – instead, we take a short sample every
 few seconds for music identification.&nbsp;A further key difference&nbsp;is
 that&nbsp;no audio is sent to our cloud -&nbsp;we do all the audio processing on
 the Audio Meter. We then run <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning">machine learning</a> models on the sound to reduce
 noise and isolate the music before we perform the final step of creating
 an&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_fingerprint">acoustic fingerprint</a>. The
 fingerprint is a short representation of the acoustic characteristics within
 the audio&nbsp;that is sent securely to our cloud for recognition. In
 summary,&nbsp;we have no way of hearing what is happening in the venues where
 we are installed.
 
Security
One key
 principle of security is to operate "defence in depth" - this
 essentially means having multiple layers of security to prevent, detect and
 respond to threats.
 Our Audio
 Meters and cloud platform were designed and built with industry-leading
 security standards in mind. We've implemented robust development processes and
 ongoing measures to ensure their integrity, and we continue to regularly review
 and strengthen these systems.
 
Here are some of the practical outcomes for our Audio Meters:
<ul>
 <li>The Audio Meters are locked down so they
 cannot be connected to by&nbsp;an attacker to allow them access to the
 memory storing the audio - either on a local network or through a cable.</li>
 <li>They only connect to our
 cloud platform and use industry-standard secure communications to prevent
 man-in-the-middle attacks or other spoofing.</li>
 <li>The software on Audio
 Meters is securely controlled by&nbsp;Audoo and locked with private keys that
 are stored on the Audio Meter in our factory, so rogue software can never be
 accepted and installed during over the air upgrades or through direct access.</li>
</ul>
 
In our cloud platform, we get many security advantages from hosting with Amazon Web Services (AWS) such as <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/data-center/controls/">physical data centre security</a>, <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/iso-27001-faqs/">ISO27001 certification for key infrastructure</a>&nbsp;and many services&nbsp;to develop with. Without getting too technical about it, here are the key features we use in our cloud platform to ensure security of the data we gather:
<ul>
 <li>Audit logging&nbsp;providing compliance and risk auditing</li>
 <li>Identity and access control – lock down access to defined user accounts and roles</li>
 <li>Secure networking and firewalls locking down network traffic and logging access</li>
 <li>Data segregation and end-user roles ensuring access to data is restricted</li>
 <li>Data Encryption – all data is transmitted over encrypted connections and all data stored is encrypted on disk</li>
</ul>
 
We made a short video that shows our approach to&nbsp;privacy and security:
<div class="ratio ratio-16x9"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Of3MH0E5XOc?rel=0" title="YouTube video" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></div>
 
I hope this post helped explain how our Audio Meters operate while respecting the privacy of venues we're installed in.
If you have questions, please <a href="https://audoo.com/contact">get in touch</a>...
Cheers,
Steve

A look into how our Audio Meters recognise music whilst upholding privacy.

Privacy and Security at Audoo

The last weekend in February saw the 5th instalment of <a href="https://measureofmusic.com/" target="_blank">Measure of Music</a>, a virtual event celebrating music, tech &amp; data in a weekend
long conference and hackathon. The event attracted a diverse group of speakers
and participants from a variety of backgrounds, from 71 countries and 17 time-zones
around the world - this year was bigger than ever! Audoo is proud to have sponsored this year’s event, and to kick-off
the weekend by speaking about the importance of accurate public performance
data within the music industry, and how it enables accurate distribution of
performance royalties to artists, writers and rightsholders (<a href="https://conference.measureofmusic.com/talks/measure-of-music-friday-kick-off-with-audoo/" target="_blank">watch replay</a>).
It was a pleasure to provide real-world data collected from our Audio
Meters across four territories and three continents. A huge thanks goes to our engineering team, who dedicated
their weekends to help and mentor participants throughout the weekend wherever
possible. It was impressive to see so many participants committed to their
projects and delivering the best pitches they could after a gruelling 48 hours.
Hearing teams discuss how public performance data can be used to train models and add value to
artist marketing/audience development strategies was especially pleasing! <img src="https://assets.audoo.com/content/image/165f1b385cb54eb0a87a9d3d606c3750.webp" width="567" style="width: 567px; margin: 0px auto; display: block;"> Congratulations to the winning team (Team 6) for
their pitch on Gigatlas, a platform for simplified data-driven tour
planning. Gigatlas was proposed as a one-stop-shop helping artists plan tours
based on audience data, venue location and predicted travel costs. A great initiative
for independent and emerging artists, and another example where Audoo public
performance data could be used to identify and validate potential audiences. <img src="https://assets.audoo.com/content/image/6ef9419a460f4c80ad12fd8bc6e6dca5.webp" alt="" width="634" height="353" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"> For example, if Luminate and Chartmetric data help to
identify audiences using streaming data, Audoo&nbsp;public performance data can help to validate these audiences and propose new ones based on the traction of track/artist plays by within industry sectors and commercial premises. <blockquote>Understanding where and when music is consumed in the
commercial sector can help to surface data-driven insights, and identify new potential audiences or placements for artists.</blockquote> Well done again to everyone involved – organisers, participants,
mentors and speakers. We look forward to seeing what's in store for next year's event. <ul><li>If you’re a creator,
rightsholder or PRO/CMO interested in hearing how we can support you - head to <a href="https://audoo.com/technology/background">our solutions</a>&nbsp;pages or reach
out for a demo. </li><li>If you want a deeper dive into our technology - check out this <a href="https://audoo.com/news/blog/audoo-system-architecture" target="_blank">system architecture blog</a> from our CTO Steve Robbins.</li></ul> Hash Riaz,&nbsp;Head of Product

Audoo sponsors this year's Measure of Music 2025 event, a virtual event celebrating music, tech & data in a weekend-long conference and hackathon.

Audoo x Measure of Music 2025

<h3> </h3>I’d like to introduce you to the technology we’ve built entirely in-house at
Audoo over the last few years and give you a flavour of some of the technology choices our team has made along the way. We’ll be following up in the future with more detail on various aspects of how we do things - design, security and privacy, automated testing and some specialised projects and partnerships.

 
<h3>Platform</h3>

The cloud platform is centre of everything we do at here Audoo, securely gathering data from our Audio Meters to identify tracks being played, capturing analytics and metrics to ensure operational health, aggregating world-first data for reports and delivery to partners through dashboards and file transfer.
 
<img src="https://assets.audoo.com/content/image/c5bbde2b2b144e8c9912857238af20b8.webp" style="margin: 0px auto; display: block;">

The platform itself is hosted with&nbsp;<a href="https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(70, 120, 134);">Amazon Web Services (AWS)</a> and has been built with <a href="https://clojure.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(70, 120, 134);">Clojure</a>. We love Clojure as it’s quick and enjoyable to get work done, produces efficient code and is great for working with and transforming data. The platform has been designed using the <a href="http://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(70, 120, 134);">"microservices"</a> architectural approach, meaning we divide the overall platform into smaller parts (a “microservice”), each of which are responsible for a specific area. 

For example, we have individual microservices for user account management, analytics event capture, identifying fingerprints, Audio Meter health checking and so on. Using this architectural technique works really well for our needs, allowing scaling of areas that need more processing power when needed and rapidly iterating on features separately. 

The platform has over 25 individual microservices so far, all sharing a common design pattern for monitoring, logging, deployment and the APIs they expose – allowing us to concentrate on the functionality rather than the infrastructure. The microservices are tested in isolation as part of our <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_delivery" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(70, 120, 134);">Continuous Delivery</a> process to ensure quality before deployment, then also as part of regular platform tests that drive alerts in Slack and our status page that we host publicly at <a href="https://status.audoo.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(70, 120, 134);">https://status.audoo.com/</a>
 
<img src="https://assets.audoo.com/content/image/63dfb61e29cd4d9fb2df875e23ec6060.webp" style="margin: 0px auto; display: block;">
<h2> </h2>
<h3>Audio Meters</h3>

The public face of our technology is of course our Audio Meter™, which has been many years in the making. We’ve had dozens of iterations on the external housing and the internal circuit board to get to the reliable, manufacturable, sleek and easy-to-install version that we now manufacture here in the UK.
<img src="https://assets.audoo.com/content/image/4df5d35903ae4c889e3dec763f42424e.webp" style="margin: 0px auto; display: block;">
 
An early prototype circuit board that was used to prove the concept can be seen below, measuring over 30cm2, with microphones sticking out on the edges. The team worked long and hard with external specialists to get to the multi-layer board, of which we have now built thousands&nbsp;measuring approx. 10cm2 x 4.5cm2 with the microphones directly on the board.

<img src="https://assets.audoo.com/content/image/1d7baccb256941b5a2e8be1f95c11ab2.webp" style="margin: 0px auto; display: block;">
We’ll come back to our manufacturing process in a future post – covering the testing we put every board through as it’s built and assembled into the finished Audio Meter. We love data and visibility of it, so we have real-time test results from our factory on an internal manufacturing dashboard where we can see boards at each test stage and the detailed test results as the factory run through the process. Below you can see a board that has failed on the second testing stage as well as an example of the detail captured in the audio test stage. 

<img src="https://assets.audoo.com/content/image/e05856d908874d5ba9008417f4467f5b.webp" style="margin: 0px auto; display: block;">
 
<img src="https://assets.audoo.com/content/image/16e96d88ed4d40b98bf483b052fad325.webp" style="margin: 0px auto; display: block;">
 
The embedded software that controls the Audio Meter is developed in a combination of Python, C and C++. The design goals for the software are to ensure reliability, privacy, security, simplicity and robustness, all while using as little power as possible – in fact, our Audio Meters consume less power than a standard USB phone charger. Our aim is for the Audio Meter to be plugged in and for it to “just work”… we have cellular connectivity&nbsp;inside, so as soon as it has power we can connect to our cloud platform and get recognising. 

Operating in the opposite way to smart speakers (that need to isolate and recognise voice commands that are spoken), we want to remove speech and noise from the audio to isolate the music being played. As part of this audio processing, we run a machine learning model on the Audio Meter to give a probability score on whether music is playing or not, capture sound levels and other metrics. The audio from microphones is never stored on the Audio Meter, nor is it sent to our cloud platform.&nbsp;We instead generate and send an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_fingerprint" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(70, 120, 134);">“acoustic fingerprint”</a> to our cloud to match and identify the music that is playing - this ensures privacy for the venues we are installed in. As part of our reliably efforts – for example, working around occasionally poor reception – Audio Meters are capable of offline fingerprinting, where they store the fingerprints securely to retry until we know they have been received by our cloud platform. In a future post, we’ll go into detail on the automated testing and checks we carry out when releasing software updates for the Audio Meters around the world.
 
<h3>Dashboards and Apps</h3>
 
You will have seen a few screenshots of our internal web dashboard in this blog - we use this tool to manage venues and installations, provide support, diagnose and fix problems, manage catalogue metadata, get ad-hoc reports / insights and so much more. We use <a href="https://ionicframework.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(70, 120, 134);">Ionic</a> that allows the same codebase to be used to also provide a mobile app that is used by installation partners. We’re immensely proud of our internal tooling and always get great feedback when demoing to partners and investors. Last year we also&nbsp;launched&nbsp;an externally accessible <a href="https://audoo.com/technology/dashboard" target="_blank">dashboard</a> for partners to use, which allows users to dive into reports and real-world data insights from all over the globe.
 
Our design process is lightweight but effective – moving from understanding the product requirements to wireframes, to hi-fidelity click-through demos in <a href="https://www.figma.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(70, 120, 134);">Figma</a>. Once the team has agreed the flow, our cloud and data team work on APIs that are marked up as comments on the design in parallel with the UI build-out.
 
<img src="https://assets.audoo.com/content/image/cfe86f8ebaa8469388d3cf1e91651a62.webp" style="margin: 0px auto; display: block;">
<h2> </h2>
<h3>Reporting and Data</h3>
 
As our central product is reporting the music played to our partners, naturally a huge part of our platform centres around processing the millions of analytics events we receive every day to build out the reports. We make use of several AWS services to drive this - central to this is a <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(70, 120, 134);">Redshift</a> data warehouse, with a <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/kinesis/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(70, 120, 134);">Kinesis</a> stream providing real-time on data, then <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/step-functions/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(70, 120, 134);">Step Functions</a>, <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/emr/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(70, 120, 134);">Elastic Map Reduce</a> and loading / reporting code to process batch runs overnight. As catalogue data is constantly updated and improved, during report delivery, we take a “snapshot” copy of the data being delivered to ensure analytics dashboards are based on the same data delivered to partners. We load and transform data to enable our dashboard insight use cases through a Postgres caching database to give the performance we need for these views.
<h2> </h2>
<h3>Summary</h3>
 
I’m incredibly proud of the team and what we’ve built at Audoo over the last few years – taking <a href="https://audoo.com/about/our-story" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(70, 120, 134);">Ryan’s vision</a> from a proof of concept to a super reliable product that we’re rolling out around the world. I hope you enjoyed this introduction to what we’ve built and look out for more detailed follow up posts coming soon!
 
Cheers,
Steve.

I’d like to introduce you to the technology we’ve built entirely in-house at
Audoo over the last few years here at Audoo and give you a flavour of some of the technology choices our team has made along the way. We’ll be following up in the future with more detail on various aspects of how we do things - design, security and privacy, automated testing and some specialised projects and partnerships.

Blog

Press contact: audoo@wordsandpixels.co

Privacy and Security at Audoo

Audoo x Measure of Music 2025

Audoo System Architecture