Communication Acoustics: An Introduction to Speech, Audio and Psychoacoustics

Preface to the Unfinished Manuscript of the Book

The origins of this book date back to 1980 at the Helsinki University of Technology (HUT). I started lecturing the course ‘Communication Acoustics’ (in Finnish), based on a collection of material from previous lecturers, in the tradition of engineering psychoacoustics influenced by some US and German textbooks.

The first encounter with principles on how we perceive sound was a very inspiring one, not only because of the need to traverse through a vast amount of experimental results on the functioning of hearing and gradually structure the underlying principles, but also because of having to start to generate ideas on how this could be simulated by computational means. This knowledge has gradually developed in various research projects, and the present course on ‘Communication Acoustics’ is a much more mature version than the first one.

Finishing a Finnish textbook for the course after 18 years was the proper time to look at the possibility of rewriting and extending it into an English version. This task was motivated by finding that there was no modern textbook covering the wide field of communication by sound and voice, especially from the point of view of engineering psychoacoustics. To fill a bit of this gap, this book was written. Sabbatical leave during 1999–2000 from my HUT duties allowed me to do most of this writing.

The importance of engineering psychoacoustics has been growing rapidly since the late 1980s. There are several ...