An acoustic-scene interpretation apparatus can have a transducer configured to convert an acoustic signal to a corresponding electrical signal. A feature extractor can receive a sequence of frames representing the electrical signal and extract a plurality of acoustic features corresponding to each frame. An acoustic-scene classifier can be configured to determine a most-likely acoustic state for each frame in the sequence of frames in correspondence with the respective plurality of acoustic features corresponding to the frame and a selected probability distribution of duration of an acoustic state for each of one or more classes of acoustic scenes. Each respective probability distribution of duration can correspond to a selected class of acoustic scenes. The correspondence between acoustic state and probability distribution of duration can be learned from training data corresponding to each of a plurality of classes of acoustic scenes. Related methods also are disclosed.