High-rate envelope information in many channels provides resistance to reduction of speech intelligibility produced by multi-channel fast-acting compression.
The intelligibility of speech in a competing-speech background was measured for signals that were subjected to multi-channel compression and then tone vocoded. The lowpass filter used to extract the envelopes in the vocoder preserved only low-rate envelope cues (E filter) or also preserved pitch-related cues (P filter). Intelligibility worsened with increasing number of compression channels and compression speed, but this effect was markedly reduced when the P filter was used and the number of vocoder channels was 16 as compared to 8. Thus, providing high-rate envelope cues in many channels provides resistance to the deleterious effects of fast compression.
Stone
Michael A
MA
Füllgrabe
Christian
C
Moore
Brian C J
BC
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D000328:Adult; D001309:Auditory Threshold; D003054:Cochlear Implants; D003213:Conditioning, Psychological; D003463:Cues; D044962:Data Compression; D005260:Female; D006310:Hearing Aids; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009622:Noise; D010897:Pitch Discrimination; D013065:Speech Intelligibility; D013067:Speech Perception; D055815:Young Adult