Design of modern electronic communication systems involves diversified scientific areas including algorithms, architectures, and hardware development. Variety of existent multimedia devices gives rise to development of platform-dependent signal processing algorithms. Their integration into existent digital environment is an urgent problem for application engineers.

Considering a wide range of applications including hearing aids, real-life communications, and listening to digital audio, the following research areas are of particular importance: advanced time-frequency representations, audio user interfaces, audio and speech enhancement, assisted listening, and perception and phonation modeling.

This special issue aims at publishing papers presenting novel methodologies and techniques (including theoretical methods, algorithms, software, and hardware) correspondent to these research areas indicated above.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Speech modeling, analysis, and synthesis
• Signal processing for hearing aids and natural hearing
• Speech intelligibility improvement in noisy environment
• Low-delay speech and audio processing
• Automatic speech recognition
• Text-to-speech synthesis
• Speech-based assistive technologies
• Hardware platforms for real-time signal processing
• Rapid prototyping and project portability