The disclosed embodiments provide a system that performs a sound-recognition operation. During operation, the system recognizes 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. Next, the system feeds the sequence of sound primitives into a finite-state automaton that recognizes events associated with sequences of sound primitives. Finally, the system feeds the recognized events into an output system that generates an output associated with the recognized events to be displayed to a user.