Do you enjoy listening to music while driving? Do you find radio traffic information indispensable? Do you appreciate the moments of your drive in which you can listen to or sing along with whatever you like? This book shows how we created auditory privacy in cars, making them feel sound and safe, even though automobiles were highly noisy things at the beginning of the twentieth century. It explains how engineers in the automotive industry found pride in making car engines quieter once they realized that noise stood for inefficiency. It follows them as they struggle against sounds audible within the car after the automobile had become a closed vehicle. It tells how noise-induced fatigue became an issue once the car became a mass means for touring across the country. It unravels the initial societal concerns about the dangers of car radio and what it did to drivers' attention span. It explores how car drivers listened to their cars' engines to diagnose car problems, and appreciated radio traffic information for avoiding traffic jams. And it suggests that their disdain for the ever-expanding number of roadside noise barriers made them long for new forms of in-car audio entertainment. This book also allows you to peep behind the scenes of international standardization committees and automotive test benches. What did and does the automotive industry to secure the sounds characteristic for their makes? Drawing on archives, interviews, beautiful automotive ads, and literature from the fields of cultural history, science and technology studies, sound and sensory studies, this book unveils the history of an everyday phenomenon. It is about the sounds of car engines, tires, wipers, blinkers, warning signals, in-car audio systems and, ultimately, about how we became used to listen while driving.

Provides state-of-the-art algorithms for sound capture, processing and enhancement

"Sound Capture and Processing: Practical Approaches" covers the digital signal processing algorithms and devices for capturing sounds, mostly human speech. It explores the devices and technologies used to capture, enhance and process sound for the needs of communication and speech recognition in modern computers and communication devices. This book gives a comprehensive introduction to basic acoustics and microphones, with coverage of algorithms for noise reduction, acoustic echo cancellation, dereverberation and microphone arrays; charting the progress of such technologies from their evolution to present day standard.

Sound Capture and Processing: Practical Approaches

Brings together the state-of-the-art algorithms for sound capture, processing and enhancement in one easily accessible volumeProvides invaluable implementation techniques required to process algorithms for real life applications and devicesCovers a number of advanced sound processing techniques, such as multichannel acoustic echo cancellation, dereverberation and source separationGenerously illustrated with figures and charts to demonstrate how sound capture and audio processing systems workAn accompanying website containing Matlab code to illustrate the algorithms

This invaluable guide will provide audio, R&D and software engineers in the industry of building systems or computer peripherals for speech enhancement with a comprehensive overview of the technologies, devices and algorithms required for modern computers and communication devices. Graduate students studying electrical engineering and computer science, and researchers in multimedia, cell-phones, interactive systems and acousticians will also benefit from this book.