AES London 2011
Heyser Lecture
followed by
Technical Council
Reception
Saturday, May 14, 18:30 — 20:00 (Room 1)
Heyser Lecture
followed by
Technical Council
Reception
Abstract:
The Richard C. Heyser distinguished lecturer for the 130th AES Convention is Karlheinz Brandenburg. Brandenburg has been a driving force behind some of today’s most innovative digital audio technology, notably the MP3 and MPEG audio standards. The title of his lecture is “How to Provide High Quality Audio Everywhere: The mp3 Story and More …”
Once upon a time there was the challenge to transmit high quality audio over phone lines. While this seemed impossible, ideas from psychoacoustics and signal processing—work by many researchers—helped the seemingly impossible to become reality: mp3 and other audio codecs enabled seamless transport of audio over thin lines. However, the mp3 story did not end there. The Internet was changing shape, transforming from a text-based medium into a major carrier for sound of all kinds, including music. This meant changes not only for the payload (from text to audio), but also meant new dangers for the audio quality delivered to music lovers, and it changed business models for music sales dramatically, shaking up the music industry.
Today the challenges are different: we have a multitude of (legal) sources of music, and many of us have access to Terabytes of music. How do we find our way through this abundance of available content, how do we find the gems in the millions of medium quality music? Even then, audio reproduction still is far from perfect, so how can we really fulfill the dream of complete auditory illusion, and what are the problems even today? The talk will introduce some current work on both MIR (Music Information Retrieval), on audio reproduction and the psychoacoustic research needed to get further along towards the dream of perfectly reconstructed sound.
