Sonic Watermarking

Abstract

Audio watermarking has been used mainly for digital sound. In this paper, we extend the range of its applications to live performances with a new composition method for real-time audio watermarking. Sonic watermarking mixes the sound of the watermark signal and the host sound in the air to detect illegal music recordings recorded from auditoriums. We propose an audio watermarking algorithm for sonic watermarking that increases the magnitudes of the host signal only in segmented areas pseudorandomly chosen in the time-frequency plane. The result of a MUSHRA subjective listening test assesses the acoustic quality of the method in the range of "excellent quality." The robustness is dependent on the type of music samples. For popular and orchestral music, a watermark can be stably detected from music samples that have been sonic-watermarked and then once compressed in an MPEG layer file.