Structured audio and effects processing in the MPEG-4 multimedia standard

Abstract.

While previous generations of the MPEG multimedia standard have focused primarily on coding and transmission of content digitally sampled from the real world, MPEG-4 contains extensive support for structured, synthetic and synthetic/natural hybrid coding methods. An overview is presented of the “Structured Audio” and “AudioBIFS” components of MPEG-4, which enable the description of synthetic soundtracks, musical scores, and effects algorithms and the compositing, manipulation, and synchronization of real and synthetic audio sources. A discussion of the separation of functionality between the systems layer and the audio toolset of MPEG-4 is presented, and prospects for efficient DSP-based implementations are discussed.