Perceptual issues in digital processing of music

The professional audio engineering community is concerned with the faithful reproduction of music signals for their entertainment value. Many of the important metrics of quality originate from the auditory system´s ability to detect subtle defects and degredations. The attractiveness of digital signal formats and processing is based on the reduction of these degradations by another order of magnitude. This paper presents a few illustrative examples of technical specifications based on perceptual considerations. Perceptual experiments are often informal and unpublished yet they form the basis for the technology.