The practical problem of how audio data should be managed has been addressed in order to deal with the following issues:
The work done at DEC CRL on the AudioFile [LPT<6353>>+93] project is particularly significant in using audio resources effectively. AudioFile, using the same conceptual model as the X-windows system, provides a client/server model for accessing audio devices on a variety of platforms. Several applications such as answering machines can be very easily built on top of AudioFile, which is publicly available from FTP://crl.dec.com/pub/DEC/AF. The speech skimmer project at the MIT Media Labs allows a listener to interactively skim recorded speech and listen to it at several levels of detail. See [Aro92c][Aro91a][ASea88][ABLS89][SA89][Aro93a][Aro91b][SASH93][Aro92a][Aro92b][Aro93b] for work carried out in the Speech Group at the MIT Media Labs on manipulating digitized speech and audio.
CSOUND, a music synthesis system developed at MIT by
Barry Vercoe, can be used for real-time
synthesis of complex audio. Researchers at NASA Ames have developed
the convolvotron [WWK91][WF90], a
system for real-time synthesis of directional audio. The convolvotron
is computationally intensive, but the power available on today's
desktop has seen the development of scaled-down versions of this
technology in the form of QSOUND for the Apple and Intel-[tex2html_wrap5918]
platforms.