Speech intelligibility in noise with fast compression hearing aids.

The effect of fast (syllabic) compression with overshoot reduction was studied in moderately hearing-impaired and in severely hearing-impaired listeners in quiet and in noisy situations. A test battery of daily masking noises was selected using multidimensional scaling techniques. Four relevant noises were selected: a multi-talker babble, the noise in an industrial plant, in a printing office and a city-noise background. The speech measurements show that only selected patients benefit from syllabic compression, i.e. listeners with a poor speech discrimination score. The effect in noisy surroundings was tested at the critical signal-to-noise ratio of each patient, showing whether they benefited from compression in the most critical condition or not. It turns out that the effect depends largely on the speech discrimination score and the modulation of the noise signal. When the speech discrimination score is good, compression tends to impair the results. When the speech discrimination score is poor, compression helps if the noise is modulated.

Syllabic compression and speech intelligibility in hearing impaired listeners.

Syllabic compression has not been shown unequivocally to improve speech intelligibility in hearing-impaired listeners. This paper attempts to explain the poor results by introducing the concept of minimum overshoots. The concept was tested with a digital signal processor on hearing-impaired subjects. The results show that moderate syllabic compression may raise speech intelligibility, as long as overshoots are minimized and relatively short time constants are used. Frequency equalization also contributes to speech intelligibility.

Acoustics and perception of overtone singing.

Overtone singing, a technique of Asian origin, is a special type of voice production resulting in a very pronounced, high and separate tone that can be heard over a more or less constant drone. An acoustic analysis is presented of the phenomenon and the results are described in terms of the classical theory of speech production. The overtone sound may be interpreted as the result of an interaction of closely spaced formants. For the lower overtones, these may be the first and second formant, separated from the lower harmonics by a nasal pole-zero pair, as the result of a nasalized articulation shifting from /c/ to /a/, or, as an alternative, the second formant alone, separated from the first formant by the nasal pole-zero pair, again as the result of a nasalized articulation around /c/. For overtones with a frequency higher than 800 Hz, the overtone sound can be explained as a combination of the second and third formant as the result of a careful, retroflex, and rounded articulation from /c/, via schwa /e/ to /y/ and /i/ for the highest overtones. The results indicate a firm and relatively long closure of the glottis during overtone phonation. The corresponding short open duration of the glottis introduces a glottal formant that may enhance the amplitude of the intended overtone. Perception experiments showed that listeners categorized the overtone sounds differently from normally sung vowels, which possibly has its basis in an independent perception of the small bandwidth of the resonance underlying the overtone. Their verbal judgments were in agreement with the presented phonetic-acoustic explanation.