Introduction

With the increasing use of frequency-domain techniques in audio signal processing applications such as audio compression, there is increasing emphasis on psychoacoustic-based spectral measures [243,16,99,102]. One of the classic approaches is to analyze and process signal spectra over the Bark frequency scale (also called ``critical band rate'') [267,268,265,159,89,238]. Based on the results of many psychoacoustic experiments, the Bark scale is defined so that the critical bands of human hearing have a width of one Bark. By representing spectral energy (in dB) over the Bark scale, a closer correspondence is obtained with spectral information processing in the ear.