I pitched a project to create the Personal Sound Amplifier app for android. This project could have been done in many different ways, but I realized this was an opportunity to make this type of DSP module part of the Android OS itself, and open the door to many applications that could benefit from a highly customizable multiband compressor/expander/EQ, while using Personal Sound Amplifier as the first app to make use of it (and help guide its design), and later I also used at the core of another one of my projects: Pixel Adaptive Sound.
This opened the opportunity for the development of the Dynamics Processing Effect. This effect was designed to be extremely flexible and modular, suitable for a lot of applications such as the aforementioned Personal Sound Amplifier, streaming apps (e.g. night mode in a TV, or EQ for music), hearing protection, and many other post-processing applications.
To ensure my design was flexible enough for a variety of applications, I did “customer discovery” with multiple types of stakeholders. In this case I got to share my initial API with developers from media streaming companies (think along the lines of Netflix and Spotify), Android TV, Android Auto, Audio enhancement companies, to name a few.
The final API and Implementation became the Dynamics Processing Effect in the android platform, released with Android P (api 28) in 2018.
Developer adoption was helped by outreach in various conferences and papers:
Google I/O 2018:
Google I/O 2019:
ADC 2018:
AES Convention & Paper:
Garcia, R. “The New Dynamics Processing Effect in Android Open Source Project”, 145th Convention, Audio Engineering Society, New York, NY, October 7, 2018. Preprint 10037
The code for this project is part of Android Open Source Project (AOSP). Many of my contributions can be found here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19
Thanks for reading!
-Ricardo (rago)