Project

Structured Audio

New, streaming, sound-encoding technologies are starting to fill the demand for low-bandwidth transmission of audio over the Internet, but such information-theoretic encoding schemes often don't allow for high-quality audio transmission or client-side sound manipulation. We are developing NetSound, a structured audio coding/decoding scheme (sort of a "Postscript for audio") that allows sound descriptors, algorithms, models, and schedulers to be sent efficiently over the Internet, and then altered, personalized, and reconstructed in real time at the receiver site with high fidelity. A set of tools based on this concept has been proposed by the Music, Mind and Machine group and accepted by the MPEG Consortium as part of the MPEG-4 international standard. We continue to develop and refine Structured Audio techniques in collaboration with researchers and industrial labs around the world.