A method and system are provided for extracting features from digital audio signals which exhibit variations in pitch, timbre, decay, reverberation, and other psychoacoustic attributes and learning, from the extracted features, an artificial neural network model for generating contextual latent-space representations of digital audio signals. A method and system are also provided for learning an artificial neural network model for generating consistent latent-space representations of digital audio signals in which the generated latent-space representations are comparable for the purposes of determining psychoacoustic similarity between digital audio signals. A method and system are also provided for extracting features from digital audio signals and learning, from the extracted features, an artificial neural network model for generating latent-space representations of digital audio signals which take care of selecting salient attributes of the signals that represent psychoacoustic differences between the signals.