Customer Reviews

Speech and Audio Signal Processing: Processing and Perception of Speech and Music

5 star:		(3)
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3 star:		(1)
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This is a book much needed in the speech and audio community because of its unique perspective on these topics. By their very nature, speech, music and other audio signals are only fully understood if one takes into account their perception, production, and the context within whcih they exist (language, symphony). To appreciate what to process about such signals, the scientist must have a broad appreciation of linguistics, hearing, vocal tract models, and the brain in general, in addition to the standard engineering tools and approaches. This is why this book is valuable. It indeed attempts to reach out to all these fields with just enough details to inspire the reader, and to provide links to existing more detailed literature. The book is well written, full of excellent illustrations, and it was the perfect choice for a class to graduate students in the Electrical Engineering Department where I teach at the University of Maryland. I highly recommend it.

There are many good books on speech processing, but not too many also cover music processing. In that sense, this book is good. However, the major shortcoming of this book is that in its attempt to cover many topics, it doesn't really cover any topics in great detail. The material in this book is merely a good introduction, but one is forced to go to the cited references to find more detail on specific subjects. My overall feeling on this book is rather neutral. If you are just interested in speech processing, there are other books out there which have better coverage. But I am still look for a good book that covers the signal processing of music.

The basic purpose of this book is to understand sound well enough to be able to perform speech recognition, but it also contains a lot of material relevant to music recognition and synthesis. By some quirk of international pricing, the price of this book in the UK is about half what it is in the USA, so it may be worth your while checking out UK online bookstores such as amazon.co.uk or the UK branch of bol.com for this one.

OK, maybe the title of my review's a little misleading, in the sense that this book doesn't match the inimitable Douglas Adam's masterpiece in humour.I meant it in a more literal sense, that is,this book is an excellent guide to the field of Speech & Audio Processing, with a 'holistic' approach to the subject that is refreshing indeed.It can be approached by newcomers with little difficulty - it isn't 'overly mathematical', though all the essential maths is definitely there.The experts, too, shall find new insights from two leading experts in the field.

What i like best about the book is that the chapters are short - average chapter size is only about 15 pages.Thus material is presented in 'bite-sized' chunks, making it much easier to digest.Also, since the authors opt to focus on breadth more than on depth, the book isn't imposingly thick.The layout is also very nice,making it even more of a pleasure to read.

The clarity of writing is another strong point of the book, as are the illustrations.The authors go to the heart of the matter, successfully imparting the flavour of the topic, be it the basics, or the current state-of-the-art.An excellent chapterwise bibliography makes it easy to trace further details on any topic.

All in all, it's a great book, one which stands out for the originality of its approach and the expertise of its authors. In my opinion, anyone working in the area of Speech/Audio processing should have a copy of this most accessible guide.