Audio compression using transforms and high order entropy encoding

<span>Digital audio is required to transmit large sizes of audio information through the most common communication systems; in turn this leads to more challenges in both storage and archieving. In this paper, an efficient audio compressive scheme is proposed, it depends on combined transform coding scheme; it is consist of i) bi-orthogonal (tab 9/7) wavelet transform to decompose the audio signal into low &amp; multi high sub-bands, ii) then the produced sub-bands passed through DCT to de-correlate the signal, iii) the product of the combined transform stage is passed through progressive hierarchical quantization, then traditional run-length encoding (RLE), iv) and finally LZW coding to generate the output mate bitstream. The measures Peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and compression ratio (CR) were used to conduct a comparative analysis for the performance of the whole system. Many audio test samples were utilized to test the performance behavior; the used samples have various sizes and vary in features. The simulation results appear the efficiency of these combined transforms when using LZW within the domain of data compression. The compression results are encouraging and show a remarkable reduction in audio file size with good fidelity.</span>

Case Report: Women, Be Aware that Your Vocal Charisma can Dwindle in Remote Meetings

Remote meetings via Zoom, Skype, or Teams limit the range and richness of nonverbal communication signals. Not just because of the typically sub-optimal light, posture, and gaze conditions, but also because of the reduced speaker visibility. Consequently, the speaker’s voice becomes immensely important, especially when it comes to being persuasive and conveying charismatic attributes. However, to offer a reliable service and limit the transmission bandwidth, remote meeting tools heavily rely on signal compression. It has never been analyzed how this compression affects a speaker’s persuasive and overall charismatic impact. Our study addresses this gap for the audio signal. A perception experiment was carried out in which listeners rated short stimulus utterances with systematically varied compression rates and techniques. The scalar ratings concerned a set of charismatic speaker attributes. Results show that the applied audio compression significantly influences the assessment of a speaker’s charismatic impact and that, particularly female speakers seem to be systematically disadvantaged by audio compression rates and techniques. Their charismatic impact decreases over a larger range of different codecs; and this decrease is additionally also more strongly pronounced than for male speakers. We discuss these findings with respect to two possible explanations. The first explanation is signal-based: audio compression codecs could be generally optimized for male speech and, thus, degrade female speech more (particularly in terms of charisma-associated features). Alternatively, the explanation is in the ears of the listeners who are less forgiving of signal degradation when rating female speakers’ charisma.