Maximising objective speech intelligibility by local f0 modulation

We investigated the effect on objective speech intelligibility of scaling the fundamental frequency (f0) of voiced regions in a set of utterances. The frequency scaling was driven by maximising the glimpse proportion in voiced epochs, inspired by musical consonance maximisation techniques. Results show that depending on the energetic masker and the signal to noise ratio, f0 modifications increased the mean glimpse proportion by up to 15%. On average, lower mean f0 changes resulted in greater glimpse proportions. It was also found that the glimpse proportion could be a good predictor of music consonance.