Structured audio: creation, transmission, and rendering of parametric sound representations

Structured audio representations are semantic and symbolic descriptions that are useful for ultralow-bit-rate transmission, flexible synthesis, and perceptually based manipulation and retrieval of sound. We present an overview of techniques for transmitting and synthesizing sound represented in structured format, and for creating structured representations from audio waveforms. We discuss applications for structured audio in virtual environments, music synthesis, gaming, content-based retrieval, interactive broadcast, and other multimedia contexts.