Reducing Musical Noise in Transform Based Audio Codecs

Nemer E, Thompson J, Kalker T. Reducing Musical Noise in Transform Based Audio Codecs. In: AES Convention 145. Audio Engineering Society; 2018. Paper 10056. Available from: https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=19782

@inproceedings{Nemer2018_19782,
  author = {Nemer, Elias and Thompson, Jeff and Kalker, Ton},
  title = {{Reducing Musical Noise in Transform Based Audio Codecs}},
  booktitle = {AES Convention 145},
  note = {Paper 10056},
  year = {2018},
  month = oct,
  publisher = {Audio Engineering Society},
  url = {https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=19782}
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - Reducing Musical Noise in Transform Based Audio Codecs
AU  - Nemer, Elias
AU  - Thompson, Jeff
AU  - Kalker, Ton
T2  - AES Convention 145
M1  - Paper 10056
PY  - 2018
DA  - 2018/10/06
UR  - https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=19782
PB  - Audio Engineering Society
LA  - en
AB  - This paper addresses the problem of musical noise in transform-based audio codecs. This artifact occurs when encoding audio segments with a noise-like spectrum—at low bit rates where signal quantization results in significant zero-valued coefficients. Due to the quantization commonly used, bands containing several non-zero coefficients are quantized to only one or two, giving rise to a musical artifact. This has been identified in other codecs, such as in CELT/OPUS , where a special transform is used prior to quantization to remedy the problem. In this paper we provide a modified approach consisting of a Hadamard transform combined with an interleaving scheme. Simulation shows the proposed method has a lower complexity and yields improved perceptual scores as measured by PEAQ.
ER  -