Speech envelope enhancement to improve cocktail-party listening
Daniel Cardosi, Lucas S. Baltzell, Virginia Best · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2021
A novel speech enhancement scheme is being developed in our lab with the goal of improving speech intelligibility in “cocktail party” listening environments. By manipulating the temporal envelope to increase the salience of acoustic onsets, the algorithm improves access to binaural cues sampled at these onsets. The hope is that this will lead to a more robust spatial perception and improved streaming of competing talkers that could impact a variety of applications including hearing aids and cochlear implants. The algorithm is designed to run in real time, and in order to test its efficacy in real-world environments, it must be implemented on a portable device. For this project, the algorithm is being written in the Teensyduino software and uploaded to a Tympan Rev E DSP unit fitted with a Tympan AIC CODEC daughterboard. External speech is both captured by and played back through a pair of Tympan BTE earpieces, and all processing is performed independently for each ear by the Tympan’s Teensy 4.1 microcontroller. Assuming that the algorithm is successfully implemented, speech signals delivered to the listener will have perceptibly higher crest factors (i.e., higher transient energy) than at input. The portable, bilateral, real-time implementation developed here will allow us to evaluate any associated binaural effects and their consequences in complex real-world listening tasks.