Book excerpt: The book presents selected papers at the 8th Conference on Sound and Music Technology (CSMT) held in November 2020, at Taiyuan, Shanxi, China. CSMT is a multidisciplinary conference focusing on audio processing and understanding with bias on music and acoustic signals. The primary aim of the conference is to promote the collaboration between art society and technical society in China. In this proceeding, the paper included covers a wide range topic from speech, signal processing, music understanding, machine learning and signal processing for advanced medical diagnosis and treatment applications; which demonstrates the target of CSMT merging arts and science research together.its content caters to scholars, researchers, engineers, artists, and education practitioners not only from academia but also industry, who are interested in audio/acoustics analysis signal processing, music, sound, and artificial intelligence (AI).