Communication Acoustics: An Introduction to Speech, Audio and Psychoacoustics

18Other Audio Applications

A number of audio and speech techniques have not yet been discussed in the book, and this chapter covers some of them. Four areas of application are briefly discussed in separate sections: virtual reality, sonic interaction design, computational auditory scene analysis, and music information retrieval. In addition, the last section of this chapter merely lists some techniques that are not covered at all in this book.

Virtual reality environments reproduce sound to the user using some of the sound reproduction techniques described in Chapter 14. However, the techniques required for virtual reality differ from those for basic sound reproduction because the interaction between the user and the virtual reality has a strong effect on the sound, in contrast to traditional sound reproduction where the listener does not affect the sound content. The audio engine synthesizes and reproduces a meaningful representation of the sound scene in the virtual world on-the-fly, depending on the actions of the user in the world. Another field involving interaction between humans and computers in the context of audio techniques is sonic interaction design, where new methods for human–computer interaction by means of sound are sought.

The speech recognition techniques described in Section 16.3 aim to analyse speech signals using complex pattern recognition techniques to obtain performance on a par with, or even better than human listeners are capable of. The last two techniques ...