Room Violette-101B

Speech Processing Laboratory

Coordinator:

Karen L. Payton, Professor

Size:

11' X 17' not including the (8' X 9') Test Chamber

Description:

This laboratory is used to support undergraduate and graduate courses in Digital Speech Processing (when offered) and for research.

The research work conducted in this laboratory supports a Ph.D. student and consists of investigations related to speech intelligibility, particularly by hearing-impaired listeners. This work can be divided into three distinct areas.

First, studies of the effects of speaking style on intelligibility for normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners in noise and reverberation have been conducted. The intelligibility of various hearing-aid algorithms for normal-hearing listeners using hearing-loss simulations has been investigated.

The next aspect of this work is to predict the intelligibility scores under these conditions based on the changes in the speech envelopes due to processing. Much of this work is based on modifications to the Speech Transmission Index (STI) which has been shown to be highly correlated with speech intelligibility scores in a variety of environments.

The third area of research is modeling signal processing done by the auditory periphery. A computer simulation of the auditory periphery has been developed that successfully mimics several features of auditory-nerve population responses to vowels.

Courses:

• ECE 477 - Digital Processing of Speech Signals (when offered)
• ECE 601 - Master's Graduate Thesis
• ECE 646 - Digital Speech Processing (when offered)
• ECE 701 - Doctoral Dissertation Research

Equipment:

• (Qty.)
• (1) Computer (667 MHz Pentium III, 256M RAM, 20GB HD, 15" Monitor)
• (1) Hewlett-Packard LaserJet 4L Laser Printer
• (1) IAC single-walled Sound-Attenuating Chamber
• (1) Tektronix 2235 100 MHz Oscilloscope
• (1) Hewlett-Packard 3310 Function Generator
• (1) Hewlett-Packard 3478A Multimeter
• (1) Hewlett-Packard 5328A Frequency Counter