Communication Acoustics: An Introduction to Speech, Audio and Psychoacoustics

1 How to Study and Develop Communication Acoustics

The rest of this book describes facts, theories, and models of communication by sound and voice – both human and machine. The objective of basic research in this field is to better understand how we communicate, while the engineering goal is to develop and use technology to make this communication more versatile and powerful. In both cases, the challenge is to understand a variety of topics and to solve problems by approaching them from several points of view.

1.1 Domains of Knowledge

Different phenomena in nature, living organisms, society, and technology obey different laws and exhibit different properties and thus require different scientific concepts to study them. Even when phenomena appear similar, a detailed interpretation of specific laws to be applied may be quite different. That is why we can have (and actually must use) different domains of knowledge.

In some problems it is enough to have a look at just one aspect of reality (one domain), but with complicated multidisciplinary problems, many domains must be mastered. In complex cases, such as the topic of this book, we are forced to know at least the basics of several domains of knowledge in order to master the field properly. Some of these domains are more basic, while some are important from a methodological point of view in research and others from an application or a practical point of view. For a modern approach to sound and voice communications, we deal in ...