Karlheinz Brandenburg and Mark Kahrs With the advent of multimedia,
digital signal processing (DSP) of sound has emerged from the shadow of
bandwidth limited speech processing. Today, the main appli cations of
audio DSP are high quality audio coding and the digital generation and
manipulation of music signals. They share common research topics
including percep tual measurement techniques and analysis/synthesis
methods. Smaller but nonetheless very important topics are hearing aids
using signal processing technology and hardware architectures for
digital signal processing of audio. In all these areas the last decade
has seen a significant amount of application oriented research. The
topics covered here coincide with the topics covered in the biannual
work shop on "Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics".
This event is sponsored by the IEEE Signal Processing Society (Technical
Committee on Audio and Electroacoustics) and takes place at Mohonk
Mountain House in New Paltz, New York. A short overview of each chapter
will illustrate the wide variety of technical material presented in the
chapters of this book. John Beerends: Perceptual Measurement Techniques.
The advent of perceptual measurement techniques is a byproduct of the
advent of digital coding for both speech and high quality audio signals.
Traditional measurement schemes are bad estimates for the subjective
quality after digital coding/decoding. Listening tests are subject to
sta tistical uncertainties and the basic question of repeatability in a
different environment.