1. A method for generating an audio fingerprint, comprising the steps of: transforming an audio sample of a recording to a time-frequency domain and storing each time-frequency pair in a matrix array; detecting a plurality of local maxima for a predetermined number of time slices; selecting a predetermined number of largest-magnitude maxima from the plurality of local maxima detected by said detecting; and generating one or more hash values corresponding to the predetermined number of largest-magnitude maxima.