In this survey paper the emerging MPEG-4 audio technology is discribed In the previous MPEG-1 and the MPEG-4 audio words, only the natural audio and the speech coding techniques were the standadization objects But in the MPEG-4 audio standadization, not only the natural audio and the speech coding, but also the structured audio and the synthetic speech techniques are inclued, The purpose of this expansion can be summarized as the preparation for the versatile high-quality multimedia services supposed emerge in the 21st century.