Watermarking is a covert marker meant to identify ownership. It has long been used in various forms to protect physical and digital products. For digital media, it’s used to protect copyright, intellectual property, content and more. If that watermark is attacked and compromised, the underlying security will be of no use.

In Audio Content Security: Attack Analysis on Audio Watermarking (Syngress 0128113839), authors Sogand Ghorbani and Iraj Sadegh Amiri attempt to show that watermarks on different genres of music can have different levels of effectiveness. They also discuss some attacks that can be launched against audio watermarks.

In this 52 page monograph, the authors try to demonstrate how different types of music may require different types of watermarks for security. 

The authors are seemingly non-native English speakers and the text suffers significantly from that. Their propensity for run on sentences, combined with poor grammar and ambiguous word usage, makes what could be an important work into one that is a struggle to read.

As part of their argument, they selected 40 songs from 4 different genres. Part of the challenge with categorizing music is that songs don’t always lend themselves to being pigeonholed into a specific genre.

For example, they categorized I Got You Babe by Sonny & Cher as rock, when most would categorize it as pop. They listed the Bee Gees Stayin Alive as rock, when it is in fact disco. It’s hard to understand their conclusion when their initial data set is not robust.

While the authors have a compelling thesis, the challenge with the book is understanding the authors, combined with the briefness of their approach. About 1/3 of the book is charts, figures and graphs, which does not leave much room for a compelling analysis.