Sixth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 2000) Beijing, China October 16-20, 2000

Designing Modulation Filters for Improving Speech Intelligibility in Reverberant Environments

Tomoko Kitamura, Keisuke Kinoshita, Takayuki Arai, Akiko Kusumoto, Yuji Murahara

Dept. of Electrical and Electronics Eng., Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan

In this paper, we propose a new technique to design modulation filters to reduce degradation of speech intelligibility in reverberant environments. Using the inverse modulation transfer function, we design data-derived modulation filters for each speech frequency band. These filters preprocess speech signals between a microphone and a loudspeaker that radiates speech into a performance hall. Using our modulation filters, we conducted perceptual experiments with one hearingimpaired subject and two subjects with normal hearing. Test results indicate that our proposed method improves the intelligibility of reverberant speech.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Kitamura, Tomoko / Kinoshita, Keisuke / Arai, Takayuki / Kusumoto, Akiko / Murahara, Yuji (2000): "Designing modulation filters for improving speech intelligibility in reverberant environments", In ICSLP-2000, vol.3, 586-589.