The Creative Advanced Technology Center's Audio Research Department is the portion of Creative with the mandate to actively pursue these opportunities. New audio DSP algorithms are prototyped in software and then subsequently mapped directly on to next-generation Creative ATC VLSI designs. Currently, audio DSP research is focused in three broad areas.

Spatial Sound
One major area of innovation involves those spatial aspects of sound which lie at the heart of Creative's EAX Environmental Audio initiative. Sound sources in the real world are perceived both in terms of their position and their surrounding environment. Simulating these real-world effects at playback time is a very active area of current R&D.

Enhanced Music Playback
Another major area of innovation focuses on next-generation music playback. The music playback platform of the future will not merely stream bits through a digital-to-analog converter. It will actively seek to understand the content that it is rendering, to compensate for deficiencies in that content, and to enable unprecedented listener interaction. Developing these new capabilities is one of the principal activities of the Audio Research Department.

Enhanced Voice Interaction
Voice is emerging both as an important new form of Internet audio content and as a potentially vital means of user control over programs and devices. Current research at ATC is focused on overcoming the unique challenges of voice input (e.g., acoustic echo cancellation) and on exploiting the distinctive properties of vocal signals (e.g., voice modification).