Speech and music are the most basic means of adult human communication. As technology advances and increasingly sophisticated tools become available to use with speech and music signals, scientists can study these sounds more effectively, and invent new ways of applying them for the benefit of humankind. This book includes coverage of the physiology and psychoacoustics of hearing as well as the results from research on pitch and speech perception, vocoding methods and information on many aspects of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. The authors have made use of their own research in these fields, as well as the methods and results of many other contributors.