Real Time Audio Processing Using a Low-Power Digital Signal Processor

This project focused on the creation of a series of audio processing functions that could run in real time on the ezDSP5502 processor. The Digital Signal Processor (DSP) being used for this project is an industry standard for lowpower signal processing applications. The overall goal was to have a code base that could sample audio in real time from any source, filter it in a variety of ways, run a Fast Fourier Transform on the audio, display the resulting frequency data to an LCD screen, and then output the filtered audio to an external speaker. This general process is used commonly in audio visualizer software that typically runs on a full CPU. However, this is not necessary, as a low-power DSP can achieve the same results if properly utilized. The project was broken into several sections that progressively build to the functionality described above. This paper describes the general theory, method of implementation, and experimental results for each of these sections