Provided are methods and systems for detecting the presence of a transient noise event in an audio stream using primarily or exclusively the incoming audio data. Such an approach offers improved temporal resolution and is computationally efficient. The methods and systems presented utilize some time-frequency representation of an audio signal as the basis in a predictive model in an attempt to find outlying transient noise events and interpret the true detection state as a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) to model temporal and frequency cohesion common amongst transient noise events.