An efficient block-based interpreter for MPEG-4 structured audio

The MPEG-4 audio standard provides a toolset for audio synthesis and audio processing, i.e. structured audio (SA). SA permits one to describe algorithms through its Structured Audio Orchestra Language (SAOL) programming language. Unlike some other languages of the same type, SAOL has a sample-by-sample execution structure, and this makes particularly important the overhead computation in case of an interpreted decoder implementation. This paper describes the design of an efficient virtual architecture able to exploit the data level parallelism contained in many audio synthesis and processing algorithms and to consistently reduce the implementation overhead through a block-by-block execution.