A Graduate Level Course: Audio Processing Laboratory

Abstract

Audio signal processing is a part of the digital signal processing (DSP) field in science and engineering that has developed rapidly over the past years. Expertise in audio signal processing - including speech signal processing- is becoming increasingly important for working engineers from diverse disciplines. Audio signals are stored, processed, and transmitted using digital techniques. Creating these technologies requires engineers that understand real-time application issues in the related areas. With this motivation, we designed a graduate level laboratory course which is Audio Processing Laboratory in the electrical engineering department in our school two years ago. This paper presents the status of the audio processing laboratory course in our school. We report the challenges that we have faced during the development of this course in our school and discuss the instructor’s and students’ assessments and recommendations in this real-time signal-processing laboratory course.

Many DSP laboratory courses are developed for undergraduate and graduate level engineering education. These courses mostly focus on the general signal processing techniques such as quantization, filter design, Fast Fourier Transformation (FFT), and spectral analysis [1-3].

Because of the increasing popularity of Web-based education and the advancements in streaming media applications, several web-based DSP Laboratory courses have been designed for distance education [4-8]. An internet-based signal processing laboratory that provides hands-on learning experiences in distributed learning environments has been developed by Spanias et.al[6] . This laboratory is based on an object-oriented Java-tool called Java Digital Signal Processing (JDSP). It facilitates interactive on-line simulations of modern statistical signal and spectral analysis algorithms, filter design tools, QMF banks, and state-of-the-art vocoders. Although most of the universities and colleges offer DSP laboratory courses, traditional DSP laboratory courses do not provide the needed hands-on experience with real-time audio processing technologies. During the past years in our school, signal processing courses such as DSP laboratory, speech signal processing, speech coding, and multimedia signal processing have attracted a steady group of graduate students, mostly without practical knowledge in these fields.

Knowledge in the audio processing field is essential to the understanding of the function of current and future digital audio processing systems and to forming a strong foundation for the learning of newly developed digital devices/systems with applications to audio signals. The main contribution of the proposed course to the education of engineers will be (i) the understanding, through practical applications, of the DSP theory, (ii) student involvement with state-of-art technology, (iii) the development of real-time DSP hardware and software experiences in the music and speech processing fields, (iv) student familiarization of industry development