Abstract
Natural speech often contains conflicting cues that are characteristic of confusable sounds. For example, the /k/, defined by a mid-frequency burst within 12 kHz, may also contain a high-frequency burst above 4 kHz indicative of /ta/, or vice versa. Conflicting cues can cause people to confuse the two sounds in a noisy environment. An efficient way of reducing confusion and improving speech intelligibility in noise is to modify these speech cues. This paper describes a method to manipulate consonant sounds in natural speech, based on our a priori knowledge of perceptual cues of consonants. We demonstrate that: 1) the percept of consonants in natural speech can be controlled through the manipulation of perceptual cues; 2) speech sounds can be made much more robust to noise by removing the conflicting cue and enhancing the target cue.
Original language | English (US) |
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Article number | 5508367 |
Pages (from-to) | 496-504 |
Number of pages | 9 |
Journal | IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing |
Volume | 19 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 2011 |
Keywords
- Conflicting cue
- perceptual cue
- speech processing
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Acoustics and Ultrasonics
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering