The digital music revolution has profoundly changed the way that we listen to, discover, share and appreciate music. Digitization of music has turned music into data, and has enabled a much more systematic and rigorous analysis of the music as such. “An Introduction to Audio Content Analysis” is an excellent resource for the state-of-the art conceptual and analytic tools that are used these days for the analysis of the audio signal.

Like many such technical books that are called an introduction, this classification is a bit of a misnomer. The book is fairly advanced; both in terms of content as well as the mathematics used, and would be more appropriate for a higher-level undergraduate of beginning graduate class.

Even thought the title of this book suggests that this is a general audio analysis resource, the book predominantly focuses on the content analysis of music.

This book is not the best textbook material out there. It lacks a wide variety of worked-out examples, and there are no exercises at the ends of the chapters. However, it does come with an accompanying website which is a great resource in its own right. The website provides a plethora of Matlab examples, which are one of the best aspects of this book.

Overall, this is a pretty good resource that will be a handy both for the audio analysis professionals as well as those who want to learn more about this growing and exciting field.