Spectro-Temporal Modulation Transfer Functions and Speech Intelligibility

Abstract

The most obvious feature of a speech spectrogram is the energy modulations, both in time in any given frequency channel, and along the spectral axis at any instant, due to formant peaks and their transitions, spectral edges, and rapid amplitude modulations at onsets/offsets. These modulations occur at relatively slow temporal rates (few Hz) reflecting the speed of the articulatory gestures, and hence the phonetic and syllabic rates of speech. Speech intelligibility is critically dependent on the clarity of these spectro-temporal modulations. Thus speech reconstructed from smoothed spectrograms along either dimension suffers from progressive loss of intelligibility.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 1999
Accession Number
ADA439776

Entities

People

  • Matthew C. Guyton
  • Powen Ru
  • Shihab A Shamma
  • Taishih Chi
  • Yujie Gao

Organizations

  • University of Maryland

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Acoustic Signals
  • Amplitude Modulation
  • Department Of Defense
  • Frequency
  • Human Factors Engineering
  • Information Operations
  • Intelligibility
  • Membranes
  • Military Research
  • Modulation
  • Speech
  • Transfer Functions
  • Websites

Readers

  • Fluid Dynamics.
  • Radio communications and signal processing.
  • Speech Processing/Speech Recognition.