Unification of Speech and Audio Coding Technologies for Mobile Devices

As mobile devices become multi-functional, and multiple devices converge into a single device, there is a strong market need for an audio codec that is able to provide consistent quality for mixed speech and music content. In this paper, we propose unified speech and audio coding technology which could provide best quality for both speech and music contents. For the evaluation of the new codec architecture, we followed MPEG audio listening test procedures. Three categorized (music, speech, mixed) items are used and audio experts are joined for the evaluation. The listening test results show that the performance of new codec is statistically better than that state of the art speech and audio codec for each categorized item. The new codec architecture can be used for digital radio, mobile TV, audio books and so on, which need consistent quality for both speech and music signals.