Digital Signal Processing (DSP) is an important field of study that has come about due to advances in communication theory, digital (computer) technology, and consumer devices. There is always a driving need to make things better and DSP provides many techniques for doing this. For example, people enjoy music and like to download new songs. However, with slow Internet connection speeds (typically 56 kilobits per second for a dial-up modem), downloading a song could take hours. With MP3 compression software, though, the size of the song is reduced by as much as 90%, and can be downloaded in a matter of minutes. The MP3 version of the song is not the same as the original, but is a "good enough' approximation that most users cannot distinguish from the original. How is this possible? First, it is important to know about the original song (a signal), and how it is represented digitally. This knowledge leads to an algorithm to remove data that the user will not miss. All of this is part of Digital Signal Processing.

To understand how to manipulate (process) a signal, we must first know a bit about the values that make up a signal.

Digital Signal Processing (DSP) is an important field of study that has come about due to advances in communication theory, digital (computer) technology, and consumer devices. There is always a driving need to make things better and DSP provides many techniques for doing this. For example, people enjoy music and like to download new songs. However, with slow Internet connection speeds (typically 56 kilobits per second for a dial-up modem), downloading a song could take hours. With MP3 compression software, though, the size of the song is reduced by as much as 90%, and can be downloaded in a matter of minutes. The MP3 version of the song is not the same as the original, but is a "good enough' approximation that most users cannot distinguish from the original. How is this possible? First, it is important to know about the original song (a signal), and how it is represented digitally. This knowledge leads to an algorithm to remove data that the user will not miss. All of this is part of Digital Signal Processing.