Psychoacoustics as the basis for modern audio signal data compression
Tilmann Zwicker · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2000
To almost everyone involved in music, whether they create it or listen to it, storing and transmitting music signals is of great importance. Recent progress makes it possible to store audio signals in small files and transmit them with very small transmission bandwidths, so that standardized data compression schemes, such as ATRAC (Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding) or MP3 (Motion Picture Expert Group Layer 3 Format), are now ubiquitous. Successful development of audio storage and transmission technology has always taken into account how the final receiver of audio signals and final judge of their quality, the human auditory system, can actually appreciate them. For example, standards for frequency response and wow and flutter for analog studio tape recorders were originally designed to satisfy known limits of hearing. The use of digital signal processing to exploit newly discovered intricacies of the auditory system has increased the accuracy with which stored and transmitted audio signals can be tailored to the requirements imposed by our hearing. Such accurate matching provides the basis for highly effective audio-signal data compression. This talk provides an overview of the related idiosyncrasies of human hearing, in particular, masking effects in the frequency and temporal domains.