Perceptual Audio Compression

It often happens that the model which is most natural from a conceptual (and manipulative) point of view is also the most effective from a compression point of view. This is because, in the ``right'' signal model for a natural sound, the model's parameters tend to vary quite slowly compared with the audio rate. As an example, physical models of the human voice and musical instruments have led to expressive synthesis algorithms which can also represent high-quality sound at much lower bit rates (such as MIDI event rates) than normally obtained by encoding the sound directly [46,242,246,145].

The sines+noise+transients spectral model follows a natural perceptual decomposition of sound into three qualitatively different components: ``tones'', ``noises'', and ``attacks''. This compact representation for sound is useful for both musical manipulations and data compression. It has been used, for example, to create an audio compression format comparable in quality to MPEG-AAC [23,24,16] (at 32 kbits/s), yet it can be time-scaled or frequency-shifted without introducing objectionable artifacts [140].

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About the Author: 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.