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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