MelT: A Portable, Single-GEMM Mel Audio Frontend via Non-Uniform DFT with Measured Latency and Energy Gains on GPUs
About
Modern neural audio models run on accelerators whose peak throughput comes from dense matrix multiplication, increasingly at the edge and in datacenters. The conventional acoustic frontend, however -- a Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) followed by sparse Mel aggregation -- remains a multi-stage pipeline centered on the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), with execution overheads unlike the dense linear algebra dominating the inference stack. This work introduces MelT, a portable single-stage Mel frontend that precomputes Mel-spaced Non-Uniform Discrete Fourier Transform (NDFT) bases and applies them to time-domain frames through General Matrix Multiplication (GEMM). The contribution is a computational design principle: decoupling Mel feature extraction from vendor-specific FFT primitives and lowering it onto the matrix-multiplication substrate accelerators already optimize. It is not a new spectral operator. MelT's direct projection performs more arithmetic than the FFT pipeline. Yet in the compact-resolution regime of neural audio frontends, it achieves a 1.64-times to 3.29-times latency reduction and up to a 3.03-times reduction in measured active energy, from the Apple A18 Pro to the NVIDIA H100. All gains are within-platform comparisons, accompanied by task-level validation. Word error rate stays statistically equivalent to the native frontend's on frozen Whisper models of medium size and larger; speaker-attribute classification on VoxCeleb1 is non-inferior. The cepstral extension MFCCT preserves utility on a clinical respiratory-insufficiency classification task (SPIRA) while improving on the MFCC baseline. These results indicate that, in practical regimes on the accelerators evaluated here, hardware alignment rather than arithmetic count can govern the realized cost of feature extraction.