Enhancing temporal dynamics of speech to improve intelligibility in reverberant environments

Proc. of the Forum Acusticum Sevilla, 2002

Enhancing temporal dynamics of speech to improve intelligibility in reverberant environments

N. Hodoshima, T. Arai and A. Kusumoto

Abstract: Due to reverberation, perceiving speech in a large auditorium is usually difficult. We attempted to suppress degradation of speech intelligibility in reverberant environments by enhancing in advance some temporal dynamics of speech (around 4 Hz) crucial for speech perception. Because the effect of our proposed method varies in reverberation conditions, we conducted a nonsense-word perceptual test with artificial reverberation to explore the relation between the degree of enhancement and reverberation time. The results indicate that clear improvement (up to 6.7%) was obtained especially when the targets were fricatives. We concluded that our proposed method is effective under specific conditions.

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