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audio_similarity – simple SELECT query for audio similarity search

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    Susmitha S<susmithaselvarani.ds@gmail.com>
    Apr 15, 2026, 2:52 PM UTC
    Hello PostgreSQL community,
    I have been working on a small extension that adds audio similarity
    search to PostgreSQL. I would like to ask for your suggestions on the
    approach and the SQL interface.
    IDEA:
    Once audio embeddings are generated, users can find similar audio with
    a simple SELECT query:
    SELECT * FROM similar_audio(42, 5);
    This returns the 5 most similar audio files to the file with id 42,
    including similarity score, speaker name, and filename.
    How it works
    - Audio files are processed using MFCC (librosa) to produce
    26‑dimensional embeddings.
    - Embeddings are stored using `pgvector`.
    - Similarity is cosine distance with an HNSW index for speed.
    What I would like your feedback on
    - Is the SELECT‑based interface intuitive enough for end users?
    - Are there better patterns for similarity search in PostgreSQL?
    - Any performance or design pitfalls I should be aware of?
    The extension currently provides these functions:
    - similar_audio(id, limit)– search by audio ID
    - similaraudioby_filename(filename, limit) – search by filename
    - searchsimilar(filepath, limit) – search by full path
    Requirements
    - PostgreSQL 18+ (or 17/16)
    - plpython3u and pgvector
    - Python 3.11 with librosa, soundfile, numpy
    I have tested it on 7,595 audio files (total ~10 hours) with good
    performance.
    I would greatly appreciate any suggestions on improving the query
    interface, indexing strategy, or embedding pipeline.
    Thank you for your time.
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