In talking about contemporary media, we often use a language of newness, applying words like “revolution” and “disruption.” Yet, the emergence of new sound media technologies and content—from the earliest internet radio broadcasts to the development of algorithmic music services and the origins of podcasting—are not a disruption, but a continuation of the century-long history of radio. Today’s most innovative media makers are reintroducing forms of audio storytelling from radio’s past. Sound Streams is the first book to historicize radio-internet convergence from the early ’90s through the present, demonstrating how so-called new media represent an evolutionary shift that is nevertheless historically consistent with earlier modes of broadcasting. Various iterations of internet radio, from streaming audio to podcasting, are all new radio practices rather than each being a separate new medium: radio is any sound media that is purposefully crafted to be heard by an audience. Rather than a particular set of technologies or textual conventions, web-based broadcasting combines unique practices and features and ideas from radio history. In addition, there exists a distinctive conversationality and reflexivity to radio talk, including a propensity for personal stories and emotional disclosure, that suits networked digital media culture. What media convergence has done is extend and intensify radio’s logics of connectivity and sharing; sonically mediated personal expression intended for public consideration abounds in online media networks. Sound Streams marks a significant contribution to digital media and internet studies. Its mix of cultural history, industry research, and genre and formal analysis, especially of contemporary audio storytelling, will appeal to media scholars, radio and podcast practitioners, audio journalism students, and dedicated podcast fans.

In talking about contemporary media, we often use a language of newness, applying words like “revolution” and “disruption.” Yet, the emergence of new sound media technologies and content—from the earliest internet radio broadcasts to the development of algorithmic music services and the origins of podcasting—are not a disruption, but a continuation of the century-long history of radio. Today’s most innovative media makers are reintroducing forms of audio storytelling from radio’s past. Sound Streams is the first book to historicize radio-internet convergence from the early ’90s through the present, demonstrating how so-called new media represent an evolutionary shift that is nevertheless historically consistent with earlier modes of broadcasting. Various iterations of internet radio, from streaming audio to podcasting, are all new radio practices rather than each being a separate new medium: radio is any sound media that is purposefully crafted to be heard by an audience. Rather than a particular set of technologies or textual conventions, web-based broadcasting combines unique practices and features and ideas from radio history. In addition, there exists a distinctive conversationality and reflexivity to radio talk, including a propensity for personal stories and emotional disclosure, that suits networked digital media culture. What media convergence has done is extend and intensify radio’s logics of connectivity and sharing; sonically mediated personal expression intended for public consideration abounds in online media networks. Sound Streams marks a significant contribution to digital media and internet studies. Its mix of cultural history, industry research, and genre and formal analysis, especially of contemporary audio storytelling, will appeal to media scholars, radio and podcast practitioners, audio journalism students, and dedicated podcast fans.

The interest of AI in problems related to understanding sounds has a rich history dating back to the ARPA Speech Understanding Project in the 1970s. While a great deal has been learned from this and subsequent speech understanding research, the goal of building systems that can understand general acoustic signals--continuous speech and/or non-speech sounds--from unconstrained environments is still unrealized. Instead, there are now systems that understand "clean" speech well in relatively noiseless laboratory environments, but that break down in more realistic, noisier environments. As seen in the "cocktail-party effect," humans and other mammals have the ability to selectively attend to sound from a particular source, even when it is mixed with other sounds. Computers also need to be able to decide which parts of a mixed acoustic signal are relevant to a particular purpose--which part should be interpreted as speech, and which should be interpreted as a door closing, an air conditioner humming, or another person interrupting. Observations such as these have led a number of researchers to conclude that research on speech understanding and on nonspeech understanding need to be united within a more general framework. Researchers have also begun trying to understand computational auditory frameworks as parts of larger perception systems whose purpose is to give a computer integrated information about the real world. Inspiration for this work ranges from research on how different sensors can be integrated to models of how humans' auditory apparatus works in concert with vision, proprioception, etc. Representing some of the most advanced work on computers understanding speech, this collection of papers covers the work being done to integrate speech and nonspeech understanding in computer systems.

Audio Signal Processing for Next-Generation Multimedia Communication Systems presents cutting-edge digital signal processing theory and implementation techniques for problems including speech acquisition and enhancement using microphone arrays, new adaptive filtering algorithms, multichannel acoustic echo cancellation, sound source tracking and separation, audio coding, and realistic sound stage reproduction. This book's focus is almost exclusively on the processing, transmission, and presentation of audio and acoustic signals in multimedia communications for telecollaboration where immersive acoustics will play a great role in the near future.

This professional book offers a unique, comprehensive and timely guide on 3D audio recording. Intended for sound engineers and professionals, and summarizing more than twenty-year research on this topic, it includes extensive information and details on various microphone techniques and loudspeaker layouts, such as Auro-3D®, Dolby® AtmosTM, DTS:X®, MMAD, SONY 360 Reality Audio and Ambisonics. It presents a rich set of results obtained from both objective measurements and subjective listening tests, and a number of case studies for 3D recording, ranging from solo-instrument techniques to full symphony orchestra, and microphone systems for virtual reality applications. Further, it includes a chapter on spatial hearing discussing issues of 3D audio sound reproduction. All in all, this book offers extensive, practical information for sound engineers and professionals.

Welcome to Game Audio Programming: Principles and Practices! This book is the first of its kind: an entire book dedicated to the art of game audio programming. With over fifteen chapters written by some of the top game audio programmers and sound designers in the industry, this book contains more knowledge and wisdom about game audio programming than any other volume in history. One of the goals of this book is to raise the general level of game audio programming expertise, so it is written in a manner that is accessible to beginners, while still providing valuable content for more advanced game audio programmers. Each chapter contains techniques that the authors have used in shipping games, with plenty of code examples and diagrams. There are chapters on the fundamentals of audio representation and perception; advanced usage of several different audio middleware platforms (Audiokinetic Wwise, CRI ADX2, and FMOD Studio); advanced topics including Open Sound Control, Vector-Based Amplitude Panning, and Dynamic Game Data; and more! Whether you’re an audio programmer looking for new techniques, an up-and-coming game developer looking for an area to focus on, or just the one who got saddled with the audio code, this book has something for you.

The following is a passage from our application for NATO sponsorship: "In the main, the participants in this workshop on the Psychophysics of Speech Perception come from two areas of research: - one area is that of speech perception researc,h, in which the perception of speech sounds is investigated; - the other area is that of psychoacoustics, or auditory psychophysics, in which the perception of simple non-speech sounds, such as pure tones or noise bursts, is investigated, in order to determine the properties of the hearing mechanism. Al though there is widespread agreement among both speech researchers and auditory psychophysicists that there should be a great deal of co-operation between them, the two areas have, generally speaking, remained separate, each with its own research questions, paradigms, and above all, traditions. Psychoacousticians have, so far, continued to investigate the peripheral hearing organ by means of simple sounds, regarding the preoccupations of speech researchers as too many near-empty theories in need of a more solid factual base. Speech perception researchers, on the other hand, have continued to investigate the way human listeners classify vowels and consonants, claiming that psychoacoustics is not concerned with normal, everyday, human perception.