MPEG-4 Book, The

12.2. Structured Audio Coding

The concept of SA, as presented in [VeGS98], refers to the semantic and symbolic description of sound events, which enables very low bit-rate transmission, configurable and scalable synthesis, and flexible control of sound. In SA, the sound waveform itself is not coded, but parametric models are defined and used to generate descriptions of the sound algorithms and events.

Structured audio in the MPEG-4 standard is used as a novel concept of coding and transmission of digital sound effects and synthetic music. The required bandwidth for SA depends on the type of synthesis or processing algorithm and control method used, but data rates of less than 1 kbit/s for simple music can easily be achieved [SchR98]. In this ...