Digital signal processing in acoustics. I

Abstract

Digital signal processing techniques have gained steadily in importance over the past few years in many areas of science and engineering and have transformed the character of instrumentation used in laboratory and plant. This is particularly marked in acoustics, which has both benefited from the developments in signal processing and provided significant stimulus for these developments. As a result acoustical techniques are now used in a very wide range of applications and acoustics is one area in which digital signal processing is exploited to its limits. For example, the development of fast algorithms for computing Fourier transforms and the associated developments in hardware have led to remarkable advances in the use of spectral analysis as a means of investigating the nature and characteristics of acoustic sources. Speech research has benefited considerably in this respect, and, in a rather more technological application, spectral analysis of machinery noise provides information about changes in machine condition which may indicate imminent failure. More recently the observation that human and animal muscles emit low intensity noise suggests that spectral analysis of this noise may yield information about muscle structure and performance.