Introduction

With the increasing use of frequency-domain techniques in audio signal processing applications such as audio compression, there is increasing emphasis on psychoacoustic-based spectral measures [253,16,99,103]. One of the classic approaches is to analyze and process signal spectra over the Bark frequency scale (also called ``critical band rate'') [279,280,277,163,89,245]. Based on the results of many psychoacoustic experiments, the Bark scale is defined so that the critical bands of human hearing have a width of one Bark. By representing spectral energy (in dB) over the Bark scale, a closer correspondence is obtained with spectral information processing in the ear.

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written by Julius Orion Smith III
Julius Smith's background is in electrical engineering (BS Rice 1975, PhD Stanford 1983). He is presently Professor of Music and Associate Professor (by courtesy) of Electrical Engineering at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), teaching courses and pursuing research related to signal processing applied to music and audio systems. See http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/ for details.