Kirkland, WA - Apr 7, 2008 - Neural Audio has appointed James D. "JJ" Johnston as its chief scientist. Johnston joins Neural Audio from Microsoft, where he was audio architect.

Johnston has been called the father of perceptual audio coding for his pioneering contributions to digital audio. His accomplishments during a 26-year career at AT&T Bell Labs among other achievements allowed for the distribution of digital music and digital audio over the Internet. As a technology leader at AT&T Research Labs, Johnston invented a number of basic techniques used in perceptual audio coding, especially in MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 (MP3), MPEG-2 Part 7 and MPEG-4 Part 3 Advanced Audio Coding (AAC). He also was responsible for creating the standards used for coding audio-visual information in movies, video and music formats in a digital compressed format.

Johnston retired from AT&T Labs in 2002 and joined Microsoft in Redmond, WA, as audio architect, where he designed and implemented all audio post processing functions for the Windows Vista operating platform.

Johnston is an IEEE Fellow, the recipient of the 2006 James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award and a co-recipient of the IEEE Donald G. Fink Prize Paper Award. He also is a Fellow of the Audio Engineering Society, has published more than 50 technical papers, and has been awarded more than 20 U.S. patents. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, both in electrical engineering.