Methods, systems, and apparatuses for audio event detection, where the determination of a type of sound data is made at the cluster level rather than at the frame level. The techniques provided are thus more robust to the local behavior of features of an audio signal or audio recording. The audio event detection is performed by using Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) to classify each cluster or by extracting an i-vector from each cluster. Each cluster may be classified based on an i-vector classification using a support vector machine or probabilistic linear discriminant analysis. The audio event detection significantly reduces potential smoothing error and avoids any dependency on accurate window-size tuning. Segmentation may be performed using a generalized likelihood ratio and a Bayesian information criterion, and the segments may be clustered using hierarchical agglomerative clustering. Audio frames may be clustered using K-means and GMMs.