Each chapter in this unique book about state-of-the-artapplications of digital signal processing (DSP) to audio is written byworld-renowned experts on its subject. The book is a must-have foreveryone involved in digital audio research and development. Its onlyminor defect is its high price. The book consists of ten chapters, eachdealing with a hot topic in the application of DSP to audio.
Chapter 1 deals with audio quality determination based onperceptual measurement techniques. The goal is to establish a way toassess quality automatically. The ITU recommendation P.861 is based onthis research.
Chapter 2 is about perceptual coding of high-quality digital audio.It gives details on the inner workings of MPEG as applied toaudio.
Chapter 3 is concerned with a workhorse in modern recordingstudios, digital implementation of reverberation. Many aspects of thistopic are presented in unprecedented depth.
Chapter 4 discusses an important topic: audio restoration. As inthe previous chapter, the techniques are considered in greatdetail.
Chapter 5 is an overview of the many different architectures of DSPengines, with an emphasis on DSP engines for music synthesisapplications.
Chapter 6 delves into digital hearing aids, an importantapplication of DSP and one that encounters incredible challenges at thesystem design level, such as low power, small size, and the amount ofprocessing power required.
Chapter 7 explains the principles of time and pitch scalemodifications of audio and speech.
Chapter 8 covers wavetable sampling synthesis. Almost everyone usesthis kind of synthesis when accessing a sound card to play synthesizedtunes.
Chapter 9 discusses audio signal processing based on sinusoidalanalysis and synthesis. These techniques are used in speech coding aswell as in music synthesis.
Finally, chapter 10 gives hard-to-find information on digitalwaveguide models of musical instruments. These models are similar inspirit to speech production model derivations. The goal is to be able toautomatically synthesize the sound patterns of particularinstruments.
Some missing topics, including zero delay convolution and 3D audio,would be welcome candidates for a new edition of this extremely usefulreference.