Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing TC: A New Name and Expanded Activities

Contributed by Steven Grant (TC Liaison to eNews)

The Audio and Electroacoustics (AE) Technical Committee has a new name: it is now the Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing (AASP) Technical Committee. This name change reflects the expanding interests of the committee as evidenced by the recent integration of the music signal processing community. In addition the interest areas of the TC include all aspects of processing of audio signals, including sound production, reception, transduction, analysis, enhancement, semantics and information processing, coding, synthesis, rendition, and perception.

The committee consists of 34 members, well represented world-wide and with roughly half the members from academia and half from industry. Two new members of the committee are Meinard Müller and Gael Richard whose main interests are in music signal processing.  Akihiko (Ken) Sugiyama has been elected Vice Chair of the TC for 2010. He will succeed Walter Kellermann to become the next TC Chair in 2011.

The annual increase in ICASSP submissions demonstrates the AASP‘s steady growth over the past 10 years. For example, submissions are up from 190 in 2009 to more than 220 in 2010. This suggests that this seemingly mature field still offers a potential for growth, which is clearly fueled by the steady increase of available computing power at relatively low cost, allowing more and more sophisticated processing to tackle longstanding challenges in acoustic signal processing.

IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing (ASLP) will soon publish a “Special Issue on Processing Reverberant Speech: Methodologies and Applications.” Submissions were accepted in the fall of 2009. We invite you to check out this special issue and learn about advances in this area.

The AASP Technical Committee’s main workshop is the Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics (WASPAA). This is a bi-annual event held in odd years at Mohonk Mountain House in New Paltz, New York. The most recent WASPAA workshop, held in October, 2009, was co-chaired by Jacob Benesty and Tomas Gaensler.  The workshop size is kept moderate, with  145 attendees, in order to maintain the intimate signature of the workshop for close interactions. There were 89 papers plus three keynote addresses with an overall acceptance rate of 49 percent. Dan Ellis will chair the next WASPAA in 2011.

Many members of the AASP TC are also involved in the International Workshop on Acoustic Echo and Noise Control (IWAENC). This year IWAENC will be held in Tel Aviv, Israel. All four plenary speakers and the Workshop chairman Sharon Gannot are members of the AASP Technical Committee. Visit the workshop website to learn more.