Intelligibility of Speech

Technical University of Denmark
Intelligibility of Speech
2nd semester project

DTU Electrical Engineering
Acoustic Technology
Spring semester 2008
Group 5
Troels Schmidt Lindgreen s073081
David Pelegrin Garcia s070610
Eleftheria Georganti s073203
Instructor
Thomas Ulrich Christiansen
Technical University of Denmark DTU Electrical Engineering
rsteds Plads, Building 348
2800 Lyngby
Denmark
Telephone +45 4525 3800
http://www.elektro.dtu.dk
Title:
Intelligibility of Speech
Synopsis:
Course:
31236 Auditory Signal Processing
This report deals with the intelligibility
and Perception
of speech and objective methods that can
Spring semester 2008
be used to predict it. Three different
methods are used to estimate speech
Project group: intelligibility. Namely, Articulation Index
5 (AI), Speech Intelligibility Index (SII) and
Speech Transmission Index (STI).
Participants:
Troels Schmidt Lindgreen
It has been concluded that it is pos-
David Pelegrin Garcia
sible to determine the gender of the
Eleftheria Georganti
speaker, but not the spoken language from
a long-term magnitude spectrum. The
Supervisor: main peak in the spectrum corresponds
Torsten Dau to the fundamental frequency, which is
around 125 Hz for male speakers and
Instructor:
250 Hz for females. AI and SII are useful
Thomas Ulrich Christiansen
estimators of speech intelligibility for
Date of exercise: April 17th band-limited systems whereas STI can
only be calculated if the impulse response
is available and it is used mainly in room
Pages: 27
acoustics measurements.
Copies: 4
No part of this report may be published in any form without the consent of the writers.
Introduction
This exercise investigates the intelligibility of speech and three different methods to es-
timate it are examined. Namely, the Articulation Index (AI), the Speech Intelligibility
Index (SII) and the Speech Transmission Index (STI).
The magnitude spectrum of speech and speech shaped noise of four existing speech sam-
ples is examined. It is investigated whether regional and gender characteristics can be
obtained through these spectra.
A Matlab function is composed in order to calculate the Articulation Index (AI) and
the Speech Intelligibility Index (SII). Low-pass and high-pass transmission channels with
different cut-off frequencies are used. The predictions are plotted as a function of the
cut-off frequency. Further investigation of the influence of the speech level on AI and SII
calculation is carried out.
In the last part, the presence of non-linear distortions in the transmission channel is
investigated and the concept of predicting the speech intelligibility with the Speech Trans-
mission Index (STI) is used. Simulated impulse responses are used and the corresponding
STI is calculated.
Technical University of Denmark, April 25, 2008
Troels Schmidt Lindgreen David Pelegrin Garcia Eleftheria Georganti

Contents
1 Theory 1
1.1 Definition of speech intelligibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.2 Speech reception threshold . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.3 Speech shaped noise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.4 Articulation index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.5 Speech intelligibility index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.6 Speech transmission index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2 Results 9
2.1 Spectrum of speech . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
2.3 High-pass and low-pass filtered speech . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2.4 Speech intelligibility in simulated rooms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
3 Discussion 17
3.1 Spectrum of speech . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
3.3 High-pass and low-pass filtered speech . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
3.4 Comparison of AI, SII and STI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
4 Conclusion 25
Bibliography 27
A Matlab code A1
B Long-term average spectrum of speech A5

April 2008 Chapter 1. Theory
Chapter 1
Theory
To get a better understanding in speech generation and perception, methods have been
developed in order to determine the speech intelligibility threshold. Speech intelligibility
indicates how many correct words the listener understands from speech in a given situa-
tion. Speech is generated from a talker and is received by a listener, as illustrated in figure
1.1.
Figure 1.1: Speech from one person to another. Inspired from [Poulsen, 2007, p. 3]
Page 1
Chapter 1. Theory Technical University of Denmark
1.1 Definition of speech intelligibility

Speech intelligibility is a number that indicates how much speech is understood correctly
in a certain situation. Speech intelligibility can be formulated as:
100
Speech intelligibility = R (1.1)
T
Where:
T is the number of speech units in the test.
R is the number of correct speech units.
Speech intelligibility is defined as the percentage of speech units that are understood
correctly from a speech intelligibility test [Poulsen, 2005, p. 62]. These units can be
words (and equation (1.1) is referred to as word score), syllables, or other units. Speech
intelligibility is typically drawn as a function of signal-to-noise ratio, as shown in figure
1.2.
1.2 Speech reception threshold

The Speech Reception Threshold (SRT) is defined as the signal-to-noise ratio at which the
psychometric function that describes the speech intelligibility is equal to 0.5. Thus, the
SRT depends on the test subject, the material and the score units used to determine the
intelligibility.
100%
90%
80%
ect answers [%]
70%
60%
50%
40%
Corre
30%
20%
10%
0%
-25 -20 -15 -10 -5 0
Speech relative to noise [dB]
Figure 1.2: Word score from Dantale as a function of signal-to-noise ratio. Redrawn from [Poulsen, 2005, p.
67].
A typical speech intelligibility test consists of a number of words being read out aloud by
a speaker. The listener writes what he/she hears, and the lists are compared afterwards
Page 2 Intelligibility of Speech

to find the speech intelligibility, see figure 1.3.
Transmisson
Speaker Listener
system
Text-in Text-out
Comparing
texts
Figure 1.3: Elements involved in speech intelligibility test. Inspired by [Poulsen, 2005].
There are a lot of factors to consider in speech communication systems. The transmission
system is an important part of speech intelligibility and it can be anything from the room
which is spoken in, a telephone line or the ears of the listener. It depends on the situation,
where the transmission system can be influenced by reverberation, distortion or noise etc.
Figure 1.3 shows that the transmission system is only a small part of the system. Other
important factors are:
Word material Could be sentences, words or numbers.
Presentation method Single words presented or a small text/sentence.
Open/closed response test Whether or not the words are known to the listener be-
forehand.
Speaker Speed of talking, pronunciation and dialect. Normal
speech, raised voice or shouting.
Listener Hearing ability, training, vocabulary, dialect, mother
tongue.
Scoring method Scoring by exact word or phoneme. Oral or written an-
swers.
1.3 Speech shaped noise
Speech Shaped Noise (SSN) is defined as a random noise that has the same long-term
spectrum as a given speech signal. There are many techniques to produce this kind of
noise, e.g.:
Gaussian noise can be equalized to have the same magnitude spectrum as a given
speech signal.
Page 3
The phase of a speech signal can be randomized. In this way, the signal will be
random noise but it will keep the magnitude spectrum of the original speech.
Multiple replicas of the signal (reversed or not) can be delayed and added together.
However, these techniques do not preserve the intrinsic fluctuations of speech and thus the
modulations are reduced. Nevertheless, it is possible to produce speech shaped noise that
keeps the envelope spectrum of the speech. According to [Dau and Christiansen, 2008, p.
4], one example of this kind of shaped noise is found in the so-called ICRA-noises, which
are created by the following stages, illustrated in figure 1.4:
1. Filtering of the speech signal in three adjacent bands covering the whole frequency
range of the signal.
2. Randomly reversing the sign of the samples in each band. This process modifies the
spectrum but keeps the envelope.
3. Filtering of each band with the same filters as in stage 1.
4. Add and normalise the contributions from the three bands.
Figure 1.4: Block diagram of the ICRA-noise generation for a given speech signal s(t). r1 (t), r2 (t) and r3 (t)
are uncorrelated random signals that take values 1 or 1 and have the same length as the original signal.
1.4 Articulation index

The Articulation Index (AI) was developed in order to evaluate how noise over a telephone
line affects speech intelligibility. AI estimates the physical signal-to-noise ratio as a cor-
related internal representation in the listener by calculating an effective signal-to-noise
ratio for 20 frequency bands. Masking effects are taken into account in the calculation
such that the noise may mask adjacent frequency bands. The effective contributions of
each frequency band are weighted using a band importance function to yield an index value
from 0 to 1, where 1 marks maximum intelligibility and 0 marks no intelligibility. [Dau

and Christiansen, 2008, p. 4]
It must be notes that AI quantifies the degradations of the signal introduced by the
transmission channel only. In order to predict speech intelligibility, knowledge about the
specific task is required. It is then possible to read off the speech intelligibility from AI
graphs which are based on speech intelligibility measurements representing average pop-
ulation responses of normal hearing talkers and listeners in stationary background noise.
Such a graph can be seen on figure 1.5
Figure 1.5: Relation between speech intelligibility (in %) and AI. From [Poulsen, 2005, p. 76]
.
AI is standardized in ANSI S3.5-1969.
1.5 Speech intelligibility index
The speech intelligibility index (SII) is based on the AI principle. SII uses other weighting
function and a number of modifications are implemented. One of the modifications is the
correction for change in speech spectrum according to vocal effort.
SII in standardized in ANSI S3.5-1997.
1.6 Speech transmission index
An approach to quantify the speech intelligibility from the objective sound field data
is based on the Modulation Transfer Function (MTF). MTF is a function m() (where
Page 5
= i ) which can be calculated from the impulse response h of the transmission system
and equals to: R
0
h2 (t)eit dt
m() = R (1.2)
0
h2 (t)dt
In other words equation 1.2 is the complex Fourier Transform of the squared impulse re-
sponse divided by its total energy. The MTF quantifies the leveling effect of reverberation
on the envelope of speech signals. [Houtgast and Steeneken, 1973] have developed a pro-
cedure to convert MTF data measured in seven octave bands and at several modulation
frequencies into one single quantity, which they called Speech Transmission Index (STI).
This conversion involves averaging over a certain range of modulation frequencies and
takes into account the contribution of the various frequency bands to speech quality and
the masking effect between adjacent frequency bands that occurs in the hearing system.
The exact calculations needed to determine the STI requires firstly, the calculation of
the complex MTF for the octave bands centered at 125 Hz, 250 Hz, 500 Hz, 1 kHz, 2 kHz,
4 kHz, and 8 kHz, according to equation (1.2). Then a reduction of modulation mF,k for
the different 14 modulation frequencies (0.63 Hz, 0.8 Hz, 1 Hz, 1.25 Hz, 1.6 Hz, 2 Hz, 2.5
Hz, 3.15 Hz, 4 Hz, 5 Hz, 6.3 Hz, 8 Hz, 10 Hz, and 12.5 Hz) is required, see figure 1.6. This
equals to a transformation to a signal-to-noise ratio:
!
mF,k
SNRF,k = 10 log10 (1.3)
1 mF,k
where S NRF,k is the signal-to-noise ratio in a given combination of an octave band F and
a modulation frequency band k and mF,k is the modulation frequency of the corresponding
combination of bands.
The 14 values for each octave band are then averaged across modulation frequency yielding
7 values that correspond to an octave band. These values are then multiplied by a factor
aF :
14
X SNRF,k
SNRF = aF (1.4)
k=1
14
Afterwards, the 7 octave band values S NRF are limited to 15 dB, averaged and then
normalized. This leads to the expression of the STI:
SNRav + 15
STI = (1.5)
30
where SNRav corresponds the average value of the SNR over the 7 octave bands. STI
scores are rated as seen in table 1.1.

present in the course from sender to receiver. The reduction of the modulation is described by
the MTF, m(F), which is a function of the modulation frequency, F. MTF is the basis for the
calculation of STI.
A noise signal with the same long term spectrum as speech (speech shaped noise) is used in the
measurement of STI. The noise signal is divided into 7 octave bands from 125 Hz to 8 kHz, see
figure 11.2. Each octave band is separately modulated with 14 modulation frequencies (one at a
April 2008 Chapter
time) from 0.63 Hz to 12.5 Hz. The modulation is sinusoidal and 100% and1.theTheory
signal is emitted
from the sender (the speaker).
Figure 11-2. Overview of frequency bands

and modulation frequencies in the STI
calculation.
Figure 1.6: Overview of frequency bands and modulation frequencies in the STI calculation. The gray
marks are the 9 calculations used in RASTI (RApid STI method). From [Steeneken and Houtgast, 1985, p.
14]. For each of the 98 combinations of octave band and modulation frequency the reduction in
modulation is determined. This is the MTF as a function of octave band centre frequency, k, and
STI value modulation
< 0.30 0.30 frequency, F. The0.45
0.45 reduction in modulation,
0.60 0.60 m(F,k),
0.75 is transformed
> 0.75 to a signal-to-
noise ratio by means of
STI rating Bad Poor Fair Good Excellent
SNRF,k = 10 log (m / (1-m)) dB
TableAs1.1: STI
in the AIratings. From
method the SNR [Houtgast and
is truncated to Steeneken, 1985].
a dynamic range of 30 dB but here the limits are
15 dB (in AI the limits are +12 dB and 18 dB). If SNR is >15 dB then SNR is set to 15 dB and
if SNR is < 15 dB then SNR is set to 15 dB.
Like in AI, the relation between STI and speech intelligibility score is not linear. It is
possible to read off the speech intelligibility from STI graphs like figure 1.7.
80
STI is standardized in IEC 286-16-1988, and has been revised in 2003.
Page 7
Acoustic Communication T. Poulsen
and in the STI procedure. It is seen that especially around 2 kHz the weights are different.
The STI in itself is not enough to predict the speech intelligibility. In order to use the STI it is
necessary to know the relation between speech intelligibility and STI. This is illustrated in figure
11.4 for some typical word materials.
Figure 11-4. Relation between

intelligibility and STI for different word
materials. Compare with Figure 10-6.
Figure 1.7: Relation between intelligibility and STI for different word materials. From [Houtgast and
Steeneken, 1985, p. 11].
11.2 RASTI
As seen in the STI section it is a somewhat complicated matter to calculate STI. This is not
satisfying for an objective method that should replace the cumbersome subjective measuring
methods. Therefore a simpler method, RASTI (= RApid STI) has been developed based on the
same principles as in STI. In RASTI the number of combinations of octave bands and
modulation frequencies are reduced from 98 to 9. In Figure 11-2 the combinations of frequency
bands and modulation frequencies used in RASTI are shown in grey. Only the octave bands
500 Hz and 2 kHz are used and the modulation frequencies are selected so that they cover the
most important range.
Figure 11.5 show the envelopes curves for the 500 Hz and the 2 kHz noise bands. Figure 11.6
shows the calculation procedure. There are no weighting factors in the RASTI calculation but
because of the 5 modulation frequencies used in the 2 kHz band and only 4 modulation
frequencies in the 500 Hz band, there will be a slightly higher weight for the 2 kHz band in the
average calculation.
82

April 2008 Chapter 2. Results
Chapter 2
Results
2.1 Spectrum of speech

Four speech recordings are listened and their full bandwidth long-term magnitude spec-
trum is calculated with the script provided in appendix A.
The long-term magnitude spectrum from 100 Hz to 10 kHz of the 4 speech signals and the
corresponding smoothed spectrum (using the supplied script Oct3Smooth.m) can be seen
in figures 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 and 2.4.
60 60
40 40
Magnitude [dB]
Magnitude [dB]
20 20
0 0
-20 Long term spectrum -20 Long term spectrum

1/3-octave smoothed spectrum 1/3-octave smoothed spectrum
-40 -40
100 250 500 1000 2000 4000 8000 100 250 500 1000 2000 4000 8000
Frequency [Hz] Frequency [Hz]
Figure 2.1: Long-term magnitude spectrum from Figure 2.2: Long-term magnitude spectrum from
100 Hz to 10 kHz and the corresponding smoothed 100 Hz to 10 kHz and the corresponding smoothed
spectrum for a danish female speaker. spectrum for a danish male speaker.
Page 9
Chapter 2. Results Technical University of Denmark
60 60
40 40
Magnitude [dB]
Magnitude [dB]
20 20
0 0
-20 Long term spectrum -20 Long term spectrum

1/3-octave smoothed spectrum 1/3-octave smoothed spectrum
-40 -40
100 250 500 1000 2000 4000 8000 100 250 500 1000 2000 4000 8000
Figure 2.3: Long-term magnitude spectrum from Figure 2.4: Long-term magnitude spectrum from
100 Hz to 10 kHz and the corresponding smoothed 100 Hz to 10 kHz and the corresponding smoothed
spectrum for an english female speaker. spectrum for an english male speaker.
The sampling frequency ( f s ), the number of samples (N), the bandwidth (B) and the
frequency resolution (Fres ) of the above speech signals are related when performing an
FFT. More precisely the frequency resolution (Fres ) and the bandwidth of the transformed
signal (B) equal to:
1
Fres = (2.1)
N
fs
B= (2.2)
2

The script randomizePhase is used to generate speech shaped noise from the 4 speech
samples. This script assigns a random value to the phase of each frequency component
of the signal. As explained in section 1.3, this kind of procedure does not preserve the
modulation of the signal. As an example, in figure 2.5 a speech signal and the speech
shaped noise calculated with this method are shown, both in the time domain and the
magnitude spectrum.

0.4 0.4
0.2 0.2
0 0
-0.2 -0.2
-0.4 -0.4
0 10 20 30 40 50 0 10 20 30 40 50
Time [s] Time [s]
(a) (b)
60 60
Magnitude [dB]
Magnitude [dB]
50 50
40 40
30 30
20 20
102 103 104 102 103 104
(c) (d)
Figure 2.5: Speech signal (a) and its magnitude spectrum (c). The phase of the signal has been randomized
and results in a signal (b) with magnitude spectrum (d).
2.3 High-pass and low-pass filtered speech

In order to determine the importance of each frequency region for the intelligibility of
speech, low-pass and high-pass transmission channels with different cut-off frequencies
can be used.
High-pass and low-pass filters with 20 different cut-off frequencies in the frequency range
between 100 Hz and 10 kHz were calculated using Matlab (see appendix A). The transfer
functions of the high-pass filters with different cut-off frequencies have been plotted and
can be seen in figure 2.6. Additionally, the transfer functions of the low-pass filters with
different cut-off frequencies have been plotted and can be seen in figure 2.7.
For the low-pass and high-pass filters the AI and SII are calculated using the Matlab code
that can be found in appendix A. The speech spectrum level is assumed to be normal,
raised, loud or shout, corresponding to the SPL values shown in table 2.1. The results
for the high-pass and low-pass filters can be seen in figures 2.8 and 2.9 respectively.
Page 11
0.8
Magnitude (linear)
0.6
0.4
0.2
0
50 100 200 500 1000 2000 5000 10000
Frequency [Hz]
Figure 2.6: Transfer functions of high-pass filters with different cut-off frequencies in the frequency range
between 100 Hz and 10 kHz.
Voice level dB SPL

normal 63
raised 68
loud 75
shout 82
Table 2.1: Overall speech sound pressure levels for a female speaker [Poulsen, 2005].

0.8
Magnitude (linear)
0.6
0.4
0.2
0
50 100 200 500 1000 2000 5000 10000
Frequency [Hz]
Figure 2.7: Transfer functions of low-pass filters with different cut-off frequencies in the frequency range
between 100 Hz and 10 kHz.
1 1
AI or SII
AI or SII
0.5 0.5
AI AI
SII SII
0 0
125 250 500 1000 2000 4000 8000 125 250 500 1000 2000 4000 8000
Filter cut-off frequency [Hz] Filter cut-off frequency [Hz]
1 1
AI or SII
AI or SII
0.5 0.5
AI AI
SII SII
0 0
125 250 500 1000 2000 4000 8000 125 250 500 1000 2000 4000 8000
Figure 2.8: AI and SII for high-pass filters as a function of the cutoff frequency when the speech spectrum
level is assumed to be (a) normal, (b) raised, (c) loud and (d) shout.
Page 13
1 1
AI or SII
AI or SII
0.5 0.5
AI AI
SII SII
0 0
125 250 500 1000 2000 4000 8000 125 250 500 1000 2000 4000 8000
1 1
AI or SII
AI or SII
0.5 0.5
AI AI
SII SII
0 0
125 250 500 1000 2000 4000 8000 125 250 500 1000 2000 4000 8000
Figure 2.9: AI and SII for low-pass filters as a function of the cutoff frequency when the speech spectrum
level is assumed to be (a) normal, (b) raised, (c) loud and (d) shout.

2.4 Speech intelligibility in simulated rooms

The STI for four different impulse responses from different rooms was calculated with
Matlab and the results can be seen in table 2.2. The code can be found in the appendix
A.
Simulated impulse response STI

auditorium11J02.wav 0.62
BostonSHJ01.wav 0.44
GrundvigsJ03.wav 0.33
Listen04J01.wav 0.78
Table 2.2: STI values for different rooms.
Page 15

April 2008 Chapter 3. Discussion
Chapter 3
Discussion
3.1 Spectrum of speech
It is possible to determine the sex of from a long-term magnitude spectrum by looking at

the low frequencies of the long-term magnitude spectrum of the speech signals that appear
in figures 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 and 2.4. Male have lower fundamental frequencies than females.
Fundamental frequencies for males are around 125 Hz whereas females have fundamental
frequencies around 250 Hz. [Poulsen, 2005, p. 47]. Figures 2.1 and 2.3 imply female speak-
ers as a peak appears close to 200 Hz, that corresponds to their fundamental frequency.
On the other hand, figures 2.2 and 2.4 imply male speakers as the fundamental frequency
appears to be around 100 Hz.
Is it very difficult though to determine the language used from a given long-term mag-
nitude spectrum. This is because languages have similar long-term magnitude spectra
even though the languages are fundamentally different. This can be seen on the figures
appearing in appendix B, which show the long-term magnitude spectra for speakers of
both genders and different languages.
There is a lot of research going on in the topic of speaker identification. Several tech-
niques and strategies are used and most of them are based on the scheme shown in figure
3.1.
Most of the systems use the dynamic properties of the speech signal rather than ana-
lyzing the long-term spectrum. The latter requires a long signal acquisition time to be
text-independent. According to figure 3.1, the different blocks can be implemented with
different strategies. The features extracted from the speech signal can be the cepstrum
and different cepstral coefficients or the coefficients from a linear predictor (LP) based
Page 17
Chapter 3. Discussion Technical University of Denmark
Figure 3.1: Basic speaker identification system.
on different filter models. The length of the different speech segments is also depending
on the strategy. The output of the block after the A/D conversion is a set of vectors
(describing different features of speech) that should be compared to the ones stored in a
database, corresponding to different individuals, using the concept of distance measure-
ment. Different strategies are used to determine this distance, such as pattern matching
based on vector Euclidean distances or the use of Hidden Markov Models (HMM). Finally,
a decision device has to determine the individual that provides the maximum likelihood
for a given input signal [Campbell, 1997].
A speech shaped noise generated from a speech signal is shown in figure 2.5. The time
fluctuations in the original signal (a), i.e. the envelope, disappear when the phase is ran-
domized (b), while the magnitude spectrum remains unaffected by the process, (c) and (d).
In order to incorporate the fluctuations of the speech signal into the speech shaped noise,
two methods are suggested, apart from the ICRA-noises generation described in section
1.3. The first method, illustrated in figure 3.2, uses two inputs: random noise nI (t) and
a speech signal s(t). The spectrum of the noise is equalized with the one of the speech
signal. Using the Hilbert transform, the envelope of the speech is extracted and applied
to the equalized noise. The last step is the normalization of the energy, extracted from
the spectra of the signal and the modulated speech shaped noise.
Another method is designed to obtain speech shaped noise with modulation features using
only a speech signal as shown in figure 3.3. Thus, the noise is obtained by making the
phase of the speech random, while the magnitude spectrum is preserved. Then the enve-
lope is applied and the energy is normalized in the same way as in the previous method.
The method shown in figure 3.2 has been implemented in Matlab (see Analysis_syn-

Figure 3.2: Block diagram of the used method to generate speech shaped noise with modulation features,
based on the adaption of random noise to a given speech signal.
Figure 3.3: Block diagram of the used method to generate speech shaped noise with modulation features,
based on the phase randomization of a given speech signal.
thesis.m function in appendix A) and it has been used to produce speech shaped noise
with speech envelope from a recorded sound file. The results are shown in figure 3.4. It
can be seen that the amplitude of the noise (b) is higher than the amplitude of the speech
(a). This is due to the fact that the fine structure of the noise is random noise and the
fine structure of the speech is a periodic signal. This last signal carries the same energy
as the noise with less amplitude, i.e. the speech has a lower crest factor. It can also be
noted that the spectrum of the speech shaped noise is slightly different from the one of
the speech signal (c). This is due to the convolution of the original spectrum with the
envelope spectrum, which has a reduced bandwidth as can be seen in figure 3.5.
The highest values of envelope magnitude appear at frequencies below 10 Hz, as shown
in figure 3.5. It can also be seen that a secondary peak is present around 200 Hz. This
peak represents the fundamental frequency of the speaker, in this case a female, which
has also been observed in the long-term magnitude spectrum of the same signal in figure
2.1. Therefore, it might be possible to use the envelope spectrum as a feature for speaker
recognition.
Page 19
0.4 0.4
0.2 0.2
0 0
-0.2 -0.2
-0.4 -0.4
0 10 20 30 40 50 0 10 20 30 40 50
Time [s] Time [s]
(a) (b)
55
50
45
Magnitude [dB]
40
35
30 Input noise
Speech
25
Output noise
20
102 103 104
Frequency [Hz]
(c)
Figure 3.4: Temporal waveforms of the speech signal (a) and the modulated speech shaped noise (b). The
magnitude spectra of both signals and the noise are used as input are shown in (c).
80
Envelope magnitude [dB]
70
60
50
40
30
20
1 10 100 1000
Modulation frequency [Hz]
Figure 3.5: Envelope spectrum of the speech signal.

3.3 High-pass and low-pass filtered speech
In order to derive which frequency band is the most important for the intelligibility of
speech one can convert the values of AI for the low-pass and high-pass filters, shown in
figures 2.8 and 2.9, to the corresponding speech intelligibility values according to figure
1.5 on page 5. The gradient of the resulting curves will be highest at the most impor-
tant frequency bands for speech intelligibility. This is because, at these frequency regions,
small changes in the passing bands of the filters give the highest improvements in speech
intelligibility.
In figures 3.6 the dependence of AI and SII on the speech spectrum level can be seen.
It can be seen that the AI increases with an increase of the speech level (figures 3.6 (a)
and (b)), because the SNR increases. The slopes of the curves are rather similar amongst
them and at very low frequencies (125 Hz - 400 Hz) and very high frequencies (5 kHz -
8 kHz) the values of AI, when the speech levels are loud and shout are identical. On
the other hand, the SII presents a quite different behavior. For the low cut-off frequencies
of the high-pass filtering it can be seen that the higher the speech level the lower the SII,
for cut-off frequencies up to 1.5 kHz. From that cut-off frequency and above the SII is
improving as the speech level is increasing. This behavior, which is different to the one
observed for the AI concept, is due to the more sophisticated way that the SII procedure is
implemented. SII takes into account the different distribution of the energy in the speech
spectrum at different levels and the effect of masking.
Thus, taking into consideration figure 3.6 it can be concluded that speech level affects in
a different way the two indices.
3.4 Comparison of AI, SII and STI
The idea behind AI (and SII) is that background noise can influence intelligibility due to
masking and not all frequency components are equally important. STI is based on the
assumption that the envelope of a speech signal must be perceived correctly in order the
speech to be understood correctly. This means that AI and SII are calculated directly from
the magnitude response of the signals. On the other hand, the results given by STI are
correlated with the preservation of the envelope. AI and SII are suited to estimate speech
intelligibility of transmission channels in communication systems with limited bandwidth,
whereas STI is calculated from the impulse response and is more suited for speech intelli-
gibility in rooms.
Page 21
1 1
0.9 0.9
0.8 0.8
0.7 0.7
0.6 0.6
AI
AI
0.5 0.5
0.4 0.4
Normal Normal
0.3 Raised 0.3 Raised
0.2 Loud 0.2 Loud
Shout Shout
0.1 0.1
0 0
125 250 500 1000 2000 4000 8000 125 250 500 1000 2000 4000 8000
(a) AI - highpass (b) AI - lowpass
1 1
0.9 0.9
0.8 0.8
0.7 0.7
0.6 0.6
SII
SII
0.5 0.5
0.4 Normal 0.4 Normal
0.3 Raised 0.3 Raised
0.2 Loud 0.2 Loud
Shout Shout
0.1 0.1
0 0
125 250 500 1000 2000 4000 8000 125 250 500 1000 2000 4000 8000
(c) SII - highpass (d) SII - lowpass
Figure 3.6: Effect of different speech levels in the AI (a),(b) and SII (c), (d) for high-pass and low-pass
filtering.

STI describes the degradation of intelligibility due to masking in the modulation domain.
This correlates with the concept discussed in previous reports about the existence of a
modulation filterbank that seems to play an important role in human perception. The
idea of a modulation filterbank supports the assumption that STI is based on.
Page 23

April 2008 Chapter 4. Conclusion
Chapter 4
Conclusion
In this report, the intelligibility of speech has been discussed and the main conclusions are
the following:
From the long-term magnitude spectrum, it is possible to determine the gender of the
speaker, but not the spoken language. The main peak in the spectrum corresponds
to the fundamental frequency, which is around 125 Hz for male speakers and 250 Hz
for females.
Speech-shaped noise is used as a masker for speech intelligibility tests. However, the
speech envelope is not always preserved, and some methods have been proposed to
generate speech shaped noise with the same speech envelope.
AI and SII are affected in a different way by the change in the voice level. This is
due to the corrections on speech spectrum for different voice levels that SII applies.
The STI is a useful parameter to assess speech intelligibility in different rooms and
its calculation is based in the preservation of modulation in the speech signal. This
seems to be in agreement with the way the auditory system perceives sounds and
reinforces the assumptions of the existence of a modulation filterbank.
Page 25
Chapter 4. Conclusion Technical University of Denmark

April 2008 Bibliography
Bibliography
[Byrne et al., 1994] Byrne, D., Dillon, H., Tran, K., Arlinger, S., Wilbraham, K., Cox, R.,
Hayerman, B., Hetu, R., Kei, J., Lui, C., Kiessling, J., Notby, M. N., Nasser, N. H. A.,
Kholy, W. A. H. E., Nakanish, Y., Oyer, H., Powell, R., Stephens, D., Meredith, R.,
Sirimanna, T., Tavartkiladze, G., Frolenkov, G. I., Westerman, S., and Ludvigsen, C.
(1994). An international comparison of long-term average speech spectra. J. Acoust.
Soc. Am, 96(4):21082120.
[Campbell, 1997] Campbell, J. (1997). Speaker recognition: A tutorial. Proceedings of the

IEEE, 85(9):14371462.
[Dau and Christiansen, 2008] Dau, T. and Christiansen, T. U. (2008). Intelligibility of

speech. 1.4.0 edition.
[Houtgast and Steeneken, 1973] Houtgast, T. and Steeneken, H. (1973). The modulation
transfer function in room acoustics as a predictor of speech intelligibility. Acustica,
28(1):6673.
[Houtgast and Steeneken, 1985] Houtgast, T. and Steeneken, H. (1985). The modulation
transfer function in room acoustics. B&K Technical Review, 3.
[Poulsen, 2005] Poulsen, T. (2005). Acoustic Communication, Hearing and Speech. 2.0
edition. Only available from DTU campusnet.
[Poulsen, 2007] Poulsen, T. (2007). Speech. Only available from DTU campusnet.
[Steeneken and Houtgast, 1985] Steeneken, H. and Houtgast, T. (1985). Rasti: A tool for
evaluating auditoria. B&K Technical Review, 3.
Page 27
Bibliography Technical University of Denmark

Project group 5 April 2008
Appendix A
Matlab code

1 clc
2 clear a l l
3 close a l l
4
5 % Read w a v f i l e s
6 [ y1 , fs , Nbits ]=wavread( Speech sample 01. wav ) ; % Female , English
7 [ y2 , fs , Nbits ]=wavread( Speech sample 02. wav ) ; % Male , English
8 [ y3 , fs , Nbits ]=wavread( Speech sample 03. wav ) ; % Female , Danish
9 [ y4 , fs , Nbits ]=wavread( Speech sample 04. wav ) ; % Male , Danish
10
11 % Do s o m e t h i n g
12 N = length ( y1 ) ;
13 fres = N ;%f s /N; % R e s o l u t i o n
14 f = fs / fres .*(0: fres /2 -1) ; % Frequency a x i s
15
16 y1longterm =20* log10 (abs( f f t ( y1 , fres ) ) ) ;
20
21 vLout1 = Oct3Smooth (f , y1longterm (1: fres /2) , f_AI ) ;
25
26 figure ;
27 semilogx (f , y1longterm (1: fres /2) , Color ,[.6 .6 .6])
28 hold on ;
29 semilogx ( f_AI , vLout1 , k , LineWidth ,2) ;
30 xlim ([100 10000])
31 ylim ([ -40 70]) ;
32 set (gca , XTick ,[100 250 500 1000 2000 4000 8000]) ;
33 nicefigure ;
34 legend ( Long term spectrum , 1/3 - octave smoothed spectrum , Location , SouthWest ) ;
35 xlabel ( Frequency [ Hz ] ) ;
36 ylabel ( Magnitude [ dB ] ) ;
Page A1
APPENDIX
37 % p r i n t l a t e x ( EnglishFemale , 1 1 , 1 0 , n o f i g c o p y ) ;
38
39 figure ;
41 hold on ;
43 xlim ([100 10000])
44 ylim ([ -40 70]) ;
45 set (gca , XTick ,[100 250 500 1000 2000 4000 8000]) ;
46 nicefigure ;
50 % p r i n t l a t e x ( E n gl i sh M al e , 1 1 , 1 0 , n o f i g c o p y ) ;
51
52 figure ;
54 hold on ;
56 xlim ([100 10000])
57 ylim ([ -40 70]) ;
58 set (gca , XTick ,[100 250 500 1000 2000 4000 8000]) ;
59 nicefigure ;
63 % p r i n t l a t e x ( DanishFemale , 1 1 , 1 0 , n o f i g c o p y ) ;
64
65 figure ;
67 hold on ;
69 xlim ([100 10000])
70 ylim ([ -40 70]) ;
71 set (gca , XTick ,[100 250 500 1000 2000 4000 8000]) ;
72 nicefigure ;
76 % p r i n t l a t e x ( DanishMale , 1 1 , 1 0 , n o f i g c o p y ) ;
77
78 figure ;
79 semilogx ( f_AI , vLout1 , Color ,[.5 .5 .5]) ;
80 hold on
81 semilogx ( f_AI , vLout2 , -- , Color ,[.5 .5 .5]) ;
82 semilogx ( f_AI , vLout3 , k ) ;
83 semilogx ( f_AI , vLout4 , --k ) ;
84 xlim ([100 10000])
85 ylim ([20 60]) ;
86 set (gca , XTick ,[100 250 500 1000 2000 4000 8000]) ;
87 nicefigure ;
88 legend ( English female , English male , Danish female , Danish male , Location ,
SouthWest ) ;
Page A2 Intelligibility of Speech

91 % p r i n t l a t e x ( SpecComparison , 1 1 , 1 0 , n o f i g c o p y ) ;
92
93 % r y1 = randomizePhase ( y1 ) ;

1 clc
2 close a l l ;
3 c l e a r variables ;
4
5 [y , fs , Nbits ]=wavread( Speech sample 01. wav ) ; % Female , English
6 N = length ( y ) ;
7 t =1/ fs *(1: N ) ;
8 f = fs / N .*(0: N /2 -1) ; % Frequency a x i s
9 yfft = f f t ( y ) ;
10 ylongterm =20* log10 (abs( yfft ) ) ;
11 vLout = Oct3Smooth (f , ylongterm (1: N /2) , f_AI ) ;
12 y_energy = sum(10.^( vLout /10) ) ;
13
14 y_envelope = abs( hilbert ( y ) ) ;
15
16 % figure ;
17 % p l o t ( t , y , Color , [ . 5 . 5 . 5 ] ) ;
18 % h o l d on
19 % p l o t ( t , y e n v e l o p e , k , LineWidth , 2 ) ;
20
21 x =rand(N ,1) ;
22 % f i g u r e ; p l o t ( t , x , Color , [ . 5 . 5 . 5 ] ) ;
23 % x=x . y e n v e l o p e ;
24 % h o l d on ;
25 % plot (t ,x , k ) ;
26
27 xfft = f f t ( x ) ;
28 xlongterm =20* log10 (abs( xfft ) ) ;
29 xvLout = Oct3Smooth (f , xlongterm (1: N /2) , f_AI ) ;
30
31 f i g u r e (111) ;
32 semilogx ( f_AI , xvLout , --k ) ;
33 hold on
34
35 xfft = xfft .* abs( yfft ) ./ abs( xfft ) ;
36 x2longterm =20* log10 (abs( xfft ) ) ;
37 x2vLout = Oct3Smooth (f , x2longterm (1: N /2) , f_AI ) ;
38 semilogx ( f_AI , x2vLout , -k ) ;
39 x2 = i f f t ( xfft ) ;
40
41 x2 = x2 .* y_envelope ;
42 x2fft = f f t ( x2 ) ;
43 x2longterm =20* log10 (abs( x2fft ) ) ;
44 x2vLout = Oct3Smooth (f , x2longterm (1: N /2) , f_AI ) ;
45 x2_energy = sum(10.^( x2vLout /10) ) ;
46 x2 = x2 * sqrt ( y_energy / x2_energy ) ;
Page A3
APPENDIX
47 figure ;
48 plot (t , x2 , k ) ;
49 xlabel ( Time [ s ] ) ;
50 xlim ([0 50]) ;
51 ylim ([ -.4 .4]) ;
52 nicefigure ;
53 printlatex ( noise2_time ,7 ,8 , nofigcopy ) ;
54
55
56 f i g u r e (111) ;
57 semilogx ( f_AI , x2vLout +10* log10 ( y_energy / x2_energy ) , - , Color ,[.5 .5 .5]) ;
58 xlim ([100 10000]) ;
60 ylim ([20 55]) ;
62 nicefigure ;
63 legend ( Input noise , Speech , Output noise , Location , SouthWest ) ;
64 printlatex ( specs_mod_shape ,9 ,8 , nofigcopy ) ;


Appendix B
Long-term average spectrum of speech
s ..................... I:"
'' '"'"-" '.'".. ': ' ' ':'
: ' ' ' : : : : t' I'1 ...'.' .o.. ,, .. ..
--'i'"
i--'i---::', 1
',::::: :: , ,',','!11,
;!i ,;7!',',',
,
"'1-'"'"'"'""'"'''"''" ,,...
,
:,.,
.... ........,...,.._.: ,.

-"-
:', O:
...............
"['1i--"'---:".'"!
.... "_
i: -,- "
.,.. _,- _.,.
,o[:--.--?---!.......::.--
i-?-,-
'1::',':-
-':'' ' -:....... :"-':-"."? -:,i'"!"-'i'' ' :'":"":'".'":'
"'3.......
I ,:
I , ,12SI I2S0I ,00I , lk! 2kI kI , kI lkI
,.-,
65 ,-Tr1'r-
. . . Frequency
(Hz)
"Ii"'!, ....i"-!-"i-'-il
,-, LEGEND
'"-o
-':---;--
-!
":-'";"':"'i
o-
"r
;,o-/---'r---i---!---i'"!-
.., ,, . , ,, -':
f:v, -z_.-] , ,,, o.
o,
""'"'""'"".
"'....
. '',,": ..'
- ---i
. . o. oo,
63 !25 250 S00 ] 2k tk 8k ]6k
Frequency
FIG. 1. Maleandfemalelong-term
average
speech
sp:ctrum
(LTASS)valuesfor fivesamples
of English.SolidlineshowsLTASSaverage
across
17 speech
Figure B.1:
samples Long-term
(all samples average
exceptArabic),males spectrum
andfemal:s separately of speech.
for frequencies Fromfor[Byrne
below160Hz, combined et al., 1994, p. 2113].
higherfrequencies.
no statisticalexaminationof whether variability interacted analysisis basedon data which had been normalizedto a 70
with sample.For all samplescombined,Fig. 8 showsthe dB overall level for each talker. The deviation values are
standard deviation of individual variations from the mean similar for both sexesand at all frequenciesfrom 630 to
value at each frequencyfor males and for females.The 4000 Hz. Variabilityshowsa small but consistentincrease, Page A5
2113 J. Acoust.Soc.Am.,Vol.96, No. 4, October1994 Byrneet aL: Long-term
averagespeechspectra 2113
APPENDIX
' c') SUEDISH , , lli) SUEDISH

( A , , STpCKHqLM
, i LINKOPINe
,,0 ....,...,...,
...... .... ....................
,, ............................... ............?........
30 I, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , I r . . , , , , , . , , F,. , , , . , .
....
,o.--i-' -'/'
..............
'"":'"'
o..... -..
- ...--.y ......................
'....... '. J.....2_..
65 Fr
equenc
(Hz)
LEGEND
7-:---:-L':--
'--: :--'-
::.. :.oo... ;..-:
AVERAGE
0 LE < O.Oi
0 ...................... FEMALE
p( O.O]
5 LEp < O.OOl
0 0 ....''''''%
6 ] 2S 250 00 lk 2k 4k 8k 16k
FEMME
p(0.00]
Fr equenc (Hz)
FIG.2. MaleandfemaleLTASSvalues
forSwedish
(twosamples),
Danish,
German,
andRussian.
Solidlineshows
LTASSaverage
across
17speech
samples.
Figure B.2: Long-term average spectrum of speech. From [Byrne et al., 1994, p. 2114].
III. DISCUSSION
for bothsexes,for bandsabove4000 Hz. The only substan-
tial increases
in variabilityare in the bands80 and 100 Hz
for males and 125 and 160 Hz for females. The overallfindingof this studyis that the LTASS is
verysimilaroverthewiderangeof languages thatwereana-
E. LTASS for Arabic
lyzed.Indeed,thereis no singlelanguage or groupof lan-
The LTASS values(dB) for Arabic, normalizedto 70 dB guages whichcouldbe regarded asbeingmarkedlydifferent
overall level (linear), are shown in Fig. 9. from the others.Therefore,it is feasibleto proposea univer-
2114 J. Acoust.Soc.Am., Vol. 96, No. 4, October1994 Byrneet aL: Long-termaveragespeechspectra 2114

'!'"'T-";'": .... :'";---:' ,----- ,---,---------,-
,.:.!.il..::
......::........:
; '1 x '""'-" ;r'":'' ' - ":t
030'1
I, IIll III I II11i
iI
1 I ' I I I I i I/
o1: :-------:------
' i ....
..... ',...;...:
:, , , ', , ', ,, ',
,1-:----::-
,
...... :.....-
: : : : ,
....
,o1_____
..... +
..,,,,,,,,.,,,,,,
soE',- ;--:-;---:--- ;---;---:
:' ' ' b'":.... ',': ' ' :' ' ':-::
......... ......
,[./.
J........
......
: o[../.........
': :...?......,:..
: : : :
'F'--- ....,.....................
,,63 125 250
[,.[,.,,,,,,,.,,.,,
500 lk 2k k 8k 16k
Frequenc
FIG.3. Male
and
female
LTASS
values
forCanton.se,
Mandarin,
Vietnamese,
Japanese,
and
French.
Solid
lineshows
LTASS
average
across
17speech
samples.
salLTASSthatwouldbe applicable
to most(possibly
all) A. Male/female differences
languages
andwouldbe sufficiently
precsefor manypur-
poses.Nonetheless, therearesmallbut(statistically)
signifi- Considering
first thecomparison
betweenmalesandfe-
cantdifferences amonglanguages andmoresubstantial dif- males,themostnotablefeatureis thattheirspectra
arevir-
---65
ferences,at the low frequencies,
talkers.
betweenmale and female tuallyidenticaloverthefrequencyrangefrom250 to 5000
Hz. Within thisrange,the normalizedmale andfemalelev-
2115 J.Acoust.
Sec.Am.,Vol.96,No.4, Octo3er
1994 Byrne
etal.:Long-term
average
speech
spectra2115
,,0
L
o 3O
63 !2S 2S0 SO0 !k 2k k $k lSk
Fr equencw (Hz)
LEOEND
MALE / FEMALE AVERROE
MALE p < 0.0! , FEMALE p < 0.0l

MALE p < 0.001 FEMALE p < 0.00l
FIG.4. MaleandfemaleLTASSvalues
forSinghalese
andWelsh.Solidlineshows
LTASSaverage
across
17 speech
samples.
els, averagedover all languages,

agreewithin2 dB at all
TABLE II. Male, Female,andcombinedspeechspectra,normalizedfor 70
dBSPLoveralllevelandaveraged across
samples(excluding Arabic).Com- third-octave
frequencies except800 Hz, wherethedifference Page A7
binedis equalto maleforfrequencies
upto 160Hz; it is average
of male is 2.3 dB. (The non-normalizedvalues agree almost as
andfemales for otherfrequencies.
The spectrum(combined maleandfe-
closelyas therewas little differencebetweenthe average
male)recommended by CoxandMoore(1988)is alsoshown.
overallmale and femalespeechlevels.)For frequencies of
Frequency CoxandMoore 160 Hz andbelow,malelevelsgreatlyexceededfemalelev-
(Hz) Male Female Combined (1988) elsundoubtably becauseof thedifferencein thefundamental
63 38.6 37.0 38.6 ... frequency ranges.Thesefindingsare consistent acrosslan-
80 43.5 36.0 43.5 --. guages andconsistent withprevious research (Benson and
100 54.4 37.5 54.4 ... Hirsh,1953;TarnoczyandFant, 1964;Tarnoczy,1971;Ni-
125 57.7 40.1 57.7 ... emolleret al., 1974;Byrne,1977;Pearsons et al., 1977;Cox
160 56.8 53.4 56.8 ...
and Moore, 1988).

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Technical University of Denmark

2nd semester project

Technical University of Denmark, April 25, 2008

Troels Schmidt Lindgreen David Pelegrin Garcia Eleftheria Georganti

B Long-term average spectrum of speech A5

1.1 Definition of speech intelligibility

1.2 Speech reception threshold

Page 2 Intelligibility of Speech

to find the speech intelligibility, see figure 1.3.

1.3 Speech shaped noise

3. Filtering of each band with the same filters as in stage 1.

4. Add and normalise the contributions from the three bands.

1.4 Articulation index

Page 4 Intelligibility of Speech

and Christiansen, 2008, p. 4]

AI is standardized in ANSI S3.5-1969.

1.5 Speech intelligibility index

SII in standardized in ANSI S3.5-1997.

1.6 Speech transmission index

Page 6 Intelligibility of Speech

Figure 11-2. Overview of frequency bands

Acoustic Communication T. Poulsen

Figure 11-4. Relation between

Page 8 Intelligibility of Speech

2.1 Spectrum of speech

-20 Long term spectrum -20 Long term spectrum

-20 Long term spectrum -20 Long term spectrum

2.2 Speech shaped noise

Page 10 Intelligibility of Speech

2.3 High-pass and low-pass filtered speech

Voice level dB SPL

Page 12 Intelligibility of Speech

Page 14 Intelligibility of Speech

2.4 Speech intelligibility in simulated rooms

Simulated impulse response STI

Table 2.2: STI values for different rooms.

Page 16 Intelligibility of Speech

3.1 Spectrum of speech

It is possible to determine the sex of from a long-term magnitude spectrum by looking at

Figure 3.1: Basic speaker identification system.

3.2 Speech shaped noise

Page 18 Intelligibility of Speech

Figure 3.5: Envelope spectrum of the speech signal.

Page 20 Intelligibility of Speech

3.3 High-pass and low-pass filtered speech

3.4 Comparison of AI, SII and STI

(a) AI - highpass (b) AI - lowpass

(c) SII - highpass (d) SII - lowpass

Page 22 Intelligibility of Speech

Page 24 Intelligibility of Speech

Page 26 Intelligibility of Speech

[Campbell, 1997] Campbell, J. (1997). Speaker recognition: A tutorial. Proceedings of the

[Dau and Christiansen, 2008] Dau, T. and Christiansen, T. U. (2008). Intelligibility of

Page 28 Intelligibility of Speech

Page A2 Intelligibility of Speech

Page A4 Intelligibility of Speech

' c') SUEDISH , , lli) SUEDISH

Page A6 Intelligibility of Speech

'!'"'T-";'": .... :'";---:' ,----- ,---,---------,-

MALE / FEMALE AVERROE

MALE p < 0.0! , FEMALE p < 0.0l

els, averagedover all languages,

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