Marina Bosi

Marina Bosi is a Consulting Professor at Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA); one of the developers of MPEG, Dolby Digital, and DTS audio coders; a noted educator and co-author of a leading textbook on digital audio coding technology [1]; and an early pioneer and role model for women engineers in the audio engineering field.

Early years

Marina Bosi was born in Fiorenzuola d'Arda, a small town in northern Italy, but was raised in Cesenatico, a fishing village outside Ravenna on the Adriatic Sea. She studied flute at Conservatory of Music in Florence and, after graduating, taught flute at the Conservatory of Music in Venice.

She later went back to school at the University of Florence where she graduated with a doctorate in Physics. Her dissertation (developed and implemented at IRCAM in Paris) was “Design of a High-Speed Computer System for the Processing of Musical Sound".

Following graduation she came to the United States to be a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) working with John Chowning to develop tools allowing a musician to use multiple speakers to control the perceived location of sound sources [2].

Career in Industry

In 1988, Marina joined Digidesign where she developed and implemented several audio digital signal processing techniques (analysis/resynthesis, pitch detection, dynamic range control, data compression) for the award-winning Pro Tools audio platform. Her audio coding work brought her to the attention of Louis Fielder at Dolby who in 1991 brought her into their R&D department as a project engineer where she designed and implemented a variety of audio digital signal processing algorithms for Dolby's low bit-rate audio coding tools (including AC-2 and AC-3 "Dolby Digital").

The first woman engineer at Dolby and one of very few women audio engineers at the time, she became extremely well known in the industry through her work at Dolby and through her activities for the Audio Engineering Society where she has been a Member since 1990, held various Officer roles from 1997–2002, and was made a Fellow of the Society in 2003 [3].

In the late 1990s, Marina's professional career turned from developing proprietary audio coding tools to participating in the creation of audio coding standards (and later to the development of video and other digital media standards). She became Dolby's representative to the MPEG audio standards committee and served as the Editor of the committee that developed the "Advanced Audio Coding" (AAC) standard that was later brought to mainstream attention by its use in the Apple iPod. In 1997 she joined DTS as their Vice-President of "Technology, Standards, and Strategies" where she helped get DTS's audio coding format included in the DVD-Audio standard and where she represented DTS in a variety of national and international standardization committees including ANSI, MPEG, DVD Forum, and SDMI. In 2001 she joined MPEG LA as their Chief Technology Officer where she focused on creating and licensing "patent pools" for technology standards to ease the adoption barriers for new users. She left MPEG LA in 2007 although she has remained active in the industry as a founding Board member of the Digital Media Project and through her activities at CCRMA.

Teaching and Research

Since coming to the United States, Marina has maintained her ties with CCRMA at Stanford University. Originally a Visiting Scholar, in 1997 she became a Consulting Professor of Music which she remains today. In the early 1990s, she developed Stanford's first course in digital audio coding [4] that eventually led to the publication of a leading textbook in the area [5]. Between this course and summer workshops for industry professionals, Marina has taught audio coding to hundreds of researchers and professionals in the industry.

She also carries out research with graduate students in the Electrical Engineering and Music departments on a wide range of areas related to audio and video coding.

References

1) Marina Bosi & Richard E. Goldberg, "Introduction to Digital Audio Coding and Standards", Springer, 2003.[6]

2) Audio Engineering Society: Oral History Project [7]

3) M. Bosi, K. Brandenburg, S. Quackenbush, L. Fielder, K. Akagiri, H. Fuchs, M. Dietz, J. Herre. G. Davidson, and Y. Oikawa, “ISO/IEC MPEG-2 Advanced Audio Coding”, Journal of the Audio Eng. Soc., Vol. 45, no.10, PP. 789–814, October 1997.

4) Course website for Music 422 "Perceptual Audio Coding" at Stanford [8]

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Name	Bosi, Marina
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