The disclosed embodiments provide a system that transforms a sound into a symbolic representation. During operation, the system extracts a sequence of tiles, comprising spectrogram slices, from the sound. Next, the system determines tile features for each tile in the sequence of tiles. The system then performs a clustering operation based on the tile features to identify clusters of tiles and to associate each tile with a cluster. Finally, the system associates each identified cluster with a unique symbol, and represents the sound as a sequence of symbols representing clusters, which are associated with the sequence of tiles.