The Game Audio Strategy Guide is a comprehensive text designed to turn both novices and experienced audio designers into technical game audio pros. Providing both a theoretical foundation and practical insights, The Game Audio Strategy Guide offers a thorough look at the tools and methods needed to create industry-quality music and sound design for games. The text is supported by an extensive companion website, featuring numerous practical tutorials and exercises, which allows the reader to gain hands-on experience creating and implementing audio assets for games. The Game Audio Strategy Guide is the essential manual for anyone interested in creating audio for games, inside or outside the classroom.

This book presents and develops several important concepts of speech enhancement in a simple but rigorous way. Many of the ideas are new; not only do they shed light on this old problem but they also offer valuable tips on how to improve on some well-known conventional approaches. The book unifies all aspects of speech enhancement, from single channel, multichannel, beamforming, time domain, frequency domain and time-frequency domain, to binaural in a clear and flexible framework. It starts with an exhaustive discussion on the fundamental best (linear and nonlinear) estimators, showing how they are connected to various important measures such as the coefficient of determination, the correlation coefficient, the conditional correlation coefficient, and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). It then goes on to show how to exploit these measures in order to derive all kinds of noise reduction algorithms that can offer an accurate and versatile compromise between noise reduction and speech distortion.

An Introduction to Audio Content Analysis Enables readers to understand the algorithmic analysis of musical audio signals with AI-driven approaches An Introduction to Audio Content Analysis serves as a comprehensive guide on audio content analysis explaining how signal processing and machine learning approaches can be utilized for the extraction of musical content from audio. It gives readers the algorithmic understanding to teach a computer to interpret music signals and thus allows for the design of tools for interacting with music. The work ties together topics from audio signal processing and machine learning, showing how to use audio content analysis to pick up musical characteristics automatically. A multitude of audio content analysis tasks related to the extraction of tonal, temporal, timbral, and intensity-related characteristics of the music signal are presented. Each task is introduced from both a musical and a technical perspective, detailing the algorithmic approach as well as providing practical guidance on implementation details and evaluation. To aid in reader comprehension, each task description begins with a short introduction to the most important musical and perceptual characteristics of the covered topic, followed by a detailed algorithmic model and its evaluation, and concluded with questions and exercises. For the interested reader, updated supplemental materials are provided via an accompanying website. Written by a well-known expert in the music industry, sample topics covered in Introduction to Audio Content Analysis include: Digital audio signals and their representation, common time-frequency transforms, audio features Pitch and fundamental frequency detection, key and chord Representation of dynamics in music and intensity-related features Beat histograms, onset and tempo detection, beat histograms, and detection of structure in music, and sequence alignment Audio fingerprinting, musical genre, mood, and instrument classification An invaluable guide for newcomers to audio signal processing and industry experts alike, An Introduction to Audio Content Analysis covers a wide range of introductory topics pertaining to music information retrieval and machine listening, allowing students and researchers to quickly gain core holistic knowledge in audio analysis and dig deeper into specific aspects of the field with the help of a large amount of references.

This volume comprises the select proceedings of the annual convention of the Computer Society of India. Divided into 10 topical volumes, the proceedings present papers on state-of-the-art research, surveys, and succinct reviews. The volumes cover diverse topics ranging from communications networks to big data analytics, and from system architecture to cyber security. This volume focuses on Speech and Language Processing for Human-Machine Communications. The contents of this book will be useful to researchers and students alike.

Practical Audio Electronics is a comprehensive introduction to basic audio electronics and the fundamentals of sound circuit building, providing the reader with the necessary knowledge and skills to undertake projects from scratch. Imparting a thorough foundation of theory alongside the practical skills needed to understand, build, modify, and test audio circuits, this book equips the reader with the tools to explore the sonic possibilities that emerge when electronics technology is applied innovatively to the making of music. Suitable for all levels of technical proficiency, this book encourages a deeper understanding through highlighted sections of advanced material and example projects including circuits to make, alter, and amplify audio, providing a snapshot of the wide range of possibilities of practical audio electronics. An ideal resource for students, hobbyists, musicians, audio professionals, and those interested in exploring the possibilities of hardware-based sound and music creation.

Streaming Music examines how the Internet has become integrated in contemporary music use, by focusing on streaming as a practice and a technology for music consumption. The backdrop to this enquiry is the digitization of society and culture, where the music industry has undergone profound disruptions, and where music streaming has altered listening modes and meanings of music in everyday life. The objective of Streaming Music is to shed light on what these transformations mean for listeners, by looking at their adaptation in specific cultural contexts, but also by considering how online music platforms and streaming services guide music listeners in specific ways. Drawing on case studies from Moscow and Stockholm, and providing analysis of Spotify, VK and YouTube as popular but distinct sites for music, Streaming Music discusses, through a qualitative, cross-cultural, study, questions around music and value, music sharing, modes of engaging with music, and the way that contemporary music listening is increasingly part of mobile, automated and computational processes. Offering a nuanced perspective on these issues, it adds to research about music and digital media, shedding new light on music cultures as they appear today. As such, this volume will appeal to scholars of media, sociology and music with interests in digital technologies.

Audio Mastering: The Artists collects more than twenty interviews, drawn from more than 60 hours of discussions, with many of the world's leading mastering engineers. In these exclusive and often intimate interviews, engineers consider the audio mastering process as they, themselves, experience and shape it as the leading artists in their field. Each interview covers how engineers got started in the recording industry, what prompted them to pursue mastering, how they learned about the process, which tools and techniques they routinely use when they work, and a host of other particulars of their crafts. We also spoke with mix engineers, and craftsmen responsible for some of the more iconic mastering tools now on the market, to gain a broader perspective on their work. This book is the first to provide such a comprehensive overview of the audio mastering process told from the point-of-view of the artists who engage in it. In so doing, it pulls the curtain back on a crucial, but seldom heard from, agency in record production at large.

In this book, Geoff Hill demonstrates modern software and hardware being applied to the processes behind loudspeaker design and modelling. Modern computing power has progressed to the point that such analyses are now practical for any interested individual or small company. Loudspeaker Modelling and Design: A Practical Introduction examines the process from initial concept through specifications and theoretical simulations and onto detailed design. It demonstrates the processes of design and specification, by using detailed simulations of a loudspeaker driver; sufficient to give re-assurance that a design is practical and will perform as expected.This book brings together many different strands of modelling from electro-magnetic through to mechanical and acoustic, without getting bogged down in theoretical discussions and arguments. This practice-based book shows the techniques used in designing modern loudspeakers and transducers.

The rapid development in various fields of Digital Audio Effects, or DAFX, has led to new algorithms and this second edition of the popular book, "DAFX: Digital Audio Effects" has been updated throughout to reflect progress in the field. It maintains a unique approach to DAFX with a lecture-style introduction into the basics of effect processing. Each effect description begins with the presentation of the physical and acoustical phenomena, an explanation of the signal processing techniques to achieve the effect, followed by a discussion of musical applications and the control of effect parameters. Topics covered include: filters and delays, modulators and demodulators, nonlinear processing, spatial effects, time-segment processing, time-frequency processing, source-filter processing, spectral processing, time and frequency warping musical signals.

Updates to the second edition include: Three completely new chapters devoted to the major research areas of: Virtual Analog Effects, Automatic Mixing and Sound Source Separation, authored by leading researchers in the field .Improved presentation of the basic concepts and explanation of the related technology.Extended coverage of the MATLABTM scripts which demonstrate the implementation of the basic concepts into software programs. Companion website (www.dafx.de) which serves as the download source for MATLABTM scripts, will be updated to reflect the new material in the book.

Discussing DAFX from both an introductory and advanced level, the book systematically introduces the reader to digital signal processing concepts, how they can be applied to sound and their use in musical effects. This makes the book suitable for a range of professionals including those working in audio engineering, as well as researchers and engineers involved in the area of digital signal processing along with students on multimedia related courses.

Designed for music technology students, enthusiasts, and professionals, Audio Processes: Musical Analysis, Modification, Synthesis, and Control describes the practical design of audio processes, with a step-by-step approach from basic concepts all the way to sophisticated effects and synthesizers. The themes of analysis, modification, synthesis, and control are covered in an accessible manner and without requiring extensive mathematical skills. The order of material aids the progressive accumulation of understanding, but topics are sufficiently contained that those with prior experience can read individual chapters directly. Extensively supported with block diagrams, algorithms, and audio plots, the ideas and designs are applicable to a wide variety of contexts. The presentation style enables readers to create their own implementations, whatever their preferred programming language or environment. The designs described are practical and extensible, providing a platform for the creation of professional quality results for many different audio applications. There is an accompanying website (www.routledge.com/cw/creasey), which provides further material and examples, to support the book and aid in process development. This book includes: A comprehensive range of audio processes, both popular and less well known, extensively supported with block diagrams and other easily understood visual forms. Detailed descriptions suitable for readers who are new to the subject, and ideas to inspire those with more experience. Designs for a wide range of audio contexts that are easily implemented in visual dataflow environments, as well as conventional programming languages.

New to this edition:
* Learn how many Hollywood techniques--previously impractical on video--can help solve problems on smaller productions
* Expanded cookbook recipes section
* Technically updated throughout
Make your soundtracks as good as your pictures with this compendium of professional audio techniques that can be adapted to desktop post. Specializing in sound after the shoot, this book features many practical examples, cookbook recipes, and tutorials. Audio theory, when necessary, is presented in plain English with plenty of visual analogies.
FAQs, full explanations, and from-the-trenches tips address the complete range of processes from wiring and hardware to testing the final mix. The one-hour audio CD features platform-independent diagnostics, demonstrations, and tutorial tracks. Novices will learn how to improve their soundtrack--even after the actors have gone home. Experienced producers will learn how to solve technical and creative problems quickly.
You'll get recipes and step-by-step instructions on how to:
* build an efficient and reliable audio post setup
* plan and budget a good soundtrack
* get sound into your NLE without losing quality or sync
* edit voices and music
* record Foley and ADR
* find music and use it effectively
* find and create your own sound effects
* shape sounds with equalization, reverb, noise reduction, and more
* produce the final mix
* test the final product for various media
Please visit the author's website for additional resources: http: //www.dplay.com/book/app
* Popular DV Magazine columnist Jay Rose makes it easy to improve your soundtrack
* Includes "cookbookrecipes"--step-by-step solutions for common audio processing operations
* One-hour audio CD includes platform-independent diagnostics, demonstrations, and tutorial tracks to load into your NLE

Making its first huge impact in the 1960s through the inventions of Bob Moog, the analog synthesizer sound, riding a wave of later developments in digital and software synthesis, has now become more popular than ever. Analog Synthesizers charts the technology, instruments, designers, and musicians associated with its three major historical phases: invention in the 1960s-1970s and the music of Walter Carlos, Pink Floyd, Gary Numan, Genesis, Kraftwerk, The Human League, Tangerine Dream, and Jean-Michel Jarre; re-birth in the 1980s-1990s through techno and dance music and jazz fusion; and software synthesis. Now updated, this new edition also includes sections on the explosion from 2000 to the present day in affordable, mass market Eurorack format and other analog instruments, which has helped make the analog synthesizer sound hugely popular once again, particularly in the fields of TV and movie music. Major artists interviewed in depth include: Hans Zimmer (Golden Globe and Academy Award nominee and winner, "Gladiator" and "The Lion King") Mike Oldfield (Grammy Award winner, "Tubular Bells") Isao Tomita (Grammy Award nominee, "Snowflakes Are Dancing") Rick Wakeman (Grammy Award nominee, Yes) Tony Banks (Grammy, Ivor Novello and Brit Awards, Genesis) Nick Rhodes (Grammy Award Winner, Duran Duran) and from the worlds of TV and movie music: Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein (Primetime Emmy Award, "Stranger Things") Paul Haslinger (BMI Film and TV Music Awards, "Underworld") Suzanne Ciani (Grammy Award Nominee, "Neverland") Adam Lastiwka ("Travelers") The book opens with a grounding in the physics of sound, instrument layout, sound creation, purchasing, and instrument repair, which will help entry level musicians as well as seasoned professionals appreciate and master the secrets of analog sound synthesis. Analog Synthesizers has a companion website featuring hundreds of examples of analog sound created using dozens of classic and modern instruments.

This agenda-setting book presents state of the art research in Music and Human-Computer Interaction (also known as 'Music Interaction'). Music Interaction research is at an exciting and formative stage. Topics discussed include interactive music systems, digital and virtual musical instruments, theories, methodologies and technologies for Music Interaction. Musical activities covered include composition, performance, improvisation, analysis, live coding, and collaborative music making. Innovative approaches to existing musical activities are explored, as well as tools that make new kinds of musical activity possible. Music and Human-Computer Interaction is stimulating reading for professionals and enthusiasts alike: researchers, musicians, interactive music system designers, music software developers, educators, and those seeking deeper involvement in music interaction. It presents the very latest research, discusses fundamental ideas, and identifies key issues and directions for future work.

Download chronicles of the making of the new record industry, from the boom years of the CD revolution of the late 1980s to the crisis of the present day, with particular stress on the last decade. It follows the actions and reactions of the major international record companies, five at the beginning of the story, now four, as they ploughed their way through the digital slough of despond, bewildered by the fleet-of-foot digital innovators far more responsive to the changing marketing conditions through which (recorded) music was consumed and valued. These all have their significant place in Download but the real story is the structural change that has, almost surreptitiously, taken place, within the music business. This change, for reasons author Phil Hardy will explain in detail, has left the captains of the record industry as unable to act as they were unwilling to act. In effect they became little but very well paid observers of the shrinking of their domains.

Anyone wanting to set up a low cost web radio station will benefit from the advice and information provided by this book. Not only will you gain technical and practical know-how to enable your station to go live, but also an appreciation of the legal and copyright implications of making radio, potentially for international audiences and in the rapidly evolving environment of the web. To succeed, your radio content will need to be carefully planned and your station properly promoted. Advice is given on taking advantage of the scalability web radio introduces for building audiences in line with your resources, for scheduled live output and for making programmes available on demand, including music, news, speech radio and audience participation. Case studies from around the world are provided to demonstrate how different radio organisations are applying the new flexibility web radio has to offer in a wide range of situations. Together with its associated website www.web-radio-book.com, the book also acts as a starting point for locating a range of sources for further advice and lines of research. Learn how to: - go live with your own low cost web radio station (either managing the server yourself or using a host service) - assess the right server set-up to handle the number of simultaneous listeners expected - get the best sound quality to your listeners - take account of the range of devices available for receiving web radio - plan your station, programming and associated website - identify and reach your audience - build audience feedback and data into your station's strategy - tackle the additional legal and ethical dimensions of radio on the web - source more detailed information

- Includes a number of interviews with diverse practitioners, offering extensive case studies - Supplemented by a website to be hosted and developed by the author, including videos, practice files and additional interviews - Acts as a supplementary text to the bestselling 'Dance Music Manual', which does not include a section on performance/performance tech

Proactive Spoken Dialogue Interaction in Multi-Party Environments describes spoken dialogue systems that act as independent dialogue partners in the conversation with and between users. The resulting novel characteristics such as proactiveness and multi-party capabilities pose new challenges on the dialogue management component of such a system and require the use and administration of an extensive dialogue history. In order to assist the proactive spoken dialogue systems development, a comprehensive data collection seems mandatory and may be performed in a Wizard-of-Oz environment. Such an environment builds also the appropriate basis for an extensive usability and acceptance evaluation. Proactive Spoken Dialogue Interaction in Multi-Party Environments is a useful reference for students and researchers in speech processing.

This book discusses all aspects of computing for expressive performance, from the history of CSEMPs to the very latest research, in addition to discussing the fundamental ideas, and key issues and directions for future research. Topics and features: includes review questions at the end of each chapter; presents a survey of systems for real-time interactive control of automatic expressive music performance, including simulated conducting systems; examines two systems in detail, YQX and IMAP, each providing an example of a very different approach; introduces techniques for synthesizing expressive non-piano performances; addresses the challenges found in polyphonic music expression, from a statistical modelling point of view; discusses the automated analysis of musical structure, and the evaluation of CSEMPs; describes the emerging field of embodied expressive musical performance, devoted to building robots that can expressively perform music with traditional instruments.

Spoken dialog systems have the potential to offer highly intuitive user interfaces, as they allow systems to be controlled using natural language. However, the complexity inherent in natural language dialogs means that careful testing of the system must be carried out from the very beginning of the design process. This book examines how user models can be used to support such early evaluations in two ways: by running simulations of dialogs, and by estimating the quality judgments of users. First, a design environment supporting the creation of dialog flows, the simulation of dialogs, and the analysis of the simulated data is proposed. How the quality of user simulations may be quantified with respect to their suitability for both formative and summative evaluation is then discussed. The remainder of the book is dedicated to the problem of predicting quality judgments of users based on interaction data. New modeling approaches are presented, which process the dialogs as sequences, and which allow knowledge about the judgment behavior of users to be incorporated into predictions. All proposed methods are validated with example evaluation studies.

In Monitoring Adaptive Spoken Dialog Systems, authors Alexander Schmitt and Wolfgang Minker investigate statistical approaches that allow for recognition of negative dialog patterns in Spoken Dialog Systems (SDS). The presented stochastic methods allow a flexible, portable and accurate use. Beginning with the foundations of machine learning and pattern recognition, this monograph examines how frequently users show negative emotions in spoken dialog systems and develop novel approaches to speech-based emotion recognition using hybrid approach to model emotions. The authors make use of statistical methods based on acoustic, linguistic and contextual features to examine the relationship between the interaction flow and the occurrence of emotions using non-acted recordings several thousand real users from commercial and non-commercial SDS. Additionally, the authors present novel statistical methods that spot problems within a dialog based on interaction patterns. The approaches enable future SDS to offer more natural and robust interactions. This work provides insights, lessons and inspiration for future research and development, not only for spoken dialog systems, but for data-driven approaches to human-machine interaction in general.

In an era when performing live is more essential than ever, this is the go-to guidebook for getting your show on the road and making a living from music. Previously published as The Tour Book, this new edition has been extensively revised, reorganized, and updated to reflect today's music industry. Written by a touring professional with over 25 years of experience.

Musical robotics is a multi- and trans-disciplinary research area involving a wide range of different domains that contribute to its development, including: computer science, multimodal interfaces and processing, artificial intelligence, electronics, robotics, mechatronics and more. A musical robot requires many different complex systems to work together; integrating musical representation, techniques, expressions, detailed analysis and controls, for both playing and listening. The development of interactive multimodal systems provides advancements which enable enhanced human-machine interaction and novel possibilities for embodied robotic platforms. This volume is focused on this highly exciting interdisciplinary field. This book consists of 14 chapters highlighting different aspects of musical activities and interactions, discussing cutting edge research related to interactive multimodal systems and their integration with robots to further enhance musical understanding, interpretation, performance, education and enjoyment. It is dichotomized into two sections: Section I focuses on understanding elements of musical performance and expression while Section II concentrates on musical robots and automated instruments. Musical Robots and Interactive Multimodal Systems provides an introduction and foundation for researchers, students and practitioners to key achievements and current research trends on interactive multimodal systems and musical robotics.

Digital sound synthesis has long been approached using standard digital filtering techniques. Newer synthesis strategies, however, make use of physical descriptions of musical instruments, and allow for much more realistic and complex sound production and thereby synthesis becomes a problem of simulation.

This book has a special focus on time domain finite difference methods presented within an audio framework. It covers time series and difference operators, and basic tools for the construction and analysis of finite difference schemes, including frequency-domain and energy-based methods, with special attention paid to problems inherent to sound synthesis. Various basic lumped systems and excitation mechanisms are covered, followed by a look at the 1D wave equation, linear bar and string vibration, acoustic tube modelling, and linear membrane and plate vibration. Various advanced topics, such as the nonlinear vibration of strings and plates, are given an elaborate treatment.

Key features: Includes a historical overview of digital sound synthesis techniques, highlighting the links between the various physical modelling methodologies. A pedagogical presentation containing over 150 problems and programming exercises, and numerous figures and diagrams, and code fragments in the MATLAB(R) programming language helps the reader with limited experience of numerical methods reach an understanding of this subject. Offers a complete treatment of all of the major families of musical instruments, including certain audio effects.

"Numerical Sound Synthesis" is suitable for audio and software engineers, and researchers in digital audio, sound synthesis and more general musical acoustics. Graduate students in electrical engineering, mechanical engineering or computer science, working on the more technical side of digital audio and sound synthesis, will also find this book of interest.

The accurate determination of the speech spectrum, particularly for short frames, is commonly pursued in diverse areas including speech processing, recognition, and acoustic phonetics. With this book the author makes the subject of spectrum analysis understandable to a wide audience, including those with a solid background in general signal processing and those without such background. In keeping with these goals, this is not a book that replaces or attempts to cover the material found in a general signal processing textbook. Some essential signal processing concepts are presented in the first chapter, but even there the concepts are presented in a generally understandable fashion as far as is possible. Throughout the book, the focus is on applications to speech analysis; mathematical theory is provided for completeness, but these developments are set off in boxes for the benefit of those readers with sufficient background. Other readers may proceed through the main text, where the key results and applications will be presented in general heuristic terms, and illustrated with software routines and practical "show-and-tell" discussions of the results. At some points, the book refers to and uses the implementations in the Praat speech analysis software package, which has the advantages that it is used by many scientists around the world, and it is free and open source software. At other points, special software routines have been developed and made available to complement the book, and these are provided in the Matlab programming language. If the reader has the basic Matlab package, he/she will be able to immediately implement the programs in that platform---no extra "toolboxes" are required.

In this work, the authors present a fully statistical approach to model non--native speakers' pronunciation. Second-language speakers pronounce words in multiple different ways compared to the native speakers. Those deviations, may it be phoneme substitutions, deletions or insertions, can be modelled automatically with the new method presented here.

The methods is based on a discrete hidden Markov model as a word pronunciation model, initialized on a standard pronunciation dictionary. The implementation and functionality of the methodology has been proven and verified with a test set of non-native English in the regarding accent.

The book is written for researchers with a professional interest in phonetics and automatic speech and speaker recognition.