Application of auditory contours to speech quality measurements
Peter Daniel, Manfred Zollner, Wolfgang Ellermeier · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1999
For the development of instrumental speech quality measures it is important to model human auditory signal processing. The ITU-T standard P.861 for telephone transmission quality, however, neither takes into account the time-frequency resolution of the human ear nor its masking properties. Moreover the abstraction or contorization processes occurring in speech perception are disregarded. Terhardt proposed to use spectral pitch as the primary auditory contour. In our approach it is derived from the part-tone time-pattern (PTTP) originally conceptualized by Heinbach [Acustica 67, 242–256 (1988)]. The PTTP is extracted from an aurally adequate spectral analysis. A new instrumental method based on differences of auditory contours will be presented. The results will be compared with other instrumental methods and with data from subjective listening tests.