The importance for speech intelligibility of random fluctuations in 'steady' background noise
| Autor: | Michael A. Stone, Christian Füllgrabe, Robert C. Mackinnon, Brian C. J. Moore |
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| Rok vydání: | 2011 |
| Předmět: |
Male
Sound Spectrography Time Factors Acoustics and Ultrasonics Adolescent Acoustics Intelligibility (communication) Speech Acoustics Background noise symbols.namesake Young Adult Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous) Humans Value noise Mathematics Analysis of Variance Noise measurement Stochastic process Speech Intelligibility Auditory Threshold Noise Acoustic Stimulation Colors of noise Gaussian noise symbols Speech Perception Cues Audiometry Speech Perceptual Masking |
| Zdroj: | The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 130(5) |
| ISSN: | 1520-8524 |
| Popis: | Spectrally shaped steady noise is commonly used as a masker of speech. The effects of inherent random fluctuations in amplitude of such a noise are typically ignored. Here, the importance of these random fluctuations was assessed by comparing two cases. For one, speech was mixed with steady speech-shaped noise and N-channel tone vocoded, a process referred to as signal-domain mixing (SDM); this preserved the random fluctuations of the noise. For the second, the envelope of speech alone was extracted for each vocoder channel and a constant was added corresponding to the root-mean-square value of the noise envelope for that channel. This is referred to as envelope-domain mixing (EDM); it removed the random fluctuations of the noise. Sinusoidally modulated noise and a single talker were also used as backgrounds, with both SDM and EDM. Speech intelligibility was measured for N = 12, 19, and 30, with the target-to-background ratio fixed at −7 dB. For SDM, performance was best for the speech background and worst for the steady noise. For EDM, this pattern was reversed. Intelligibility with steady noise was consistently very poor for SDM, but near-ceiling for EDM, demonstrating that the random fluctuations in steady noise have a large effect. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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