Background: Speech perception ability depends on auditory and extra-auditory elements. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is an extra-auditory element that has an effect on the ability to normally follow speech and maintain a conversation. Speech in noise perception difficulty is a common complaint of the elderly. In this study, the importance of SNR magnitude as an extra-auditory effect on speech...

This paper describes a single acoustic–channel speech enhancement, utilizing an auxiliary non-acoustic sensor. Unlike classical algorithms, which make use of the knowledge from acoustic signal alone, the glottal correlation (GCORR) algorithm takes advantage of non-acoustic throat sensors such as the general electromagnetic motion sensor (GEMS). The non–acoustic sensor provides a measure of the ...

BACKGROUND Acoustic trauma is an injury to the hearing mechanisms in the inner ear due to excessive noise. This injury is the most prevalent cause of sensorineural hearing loss in humans, especially from occupational exposure. Previous studies have shown the essential role of free radical formation in the inner ear hearing loss caused by acoustic trauma. OBJECTIVES This study was performed to...

Information from the acoustic speech signal and the talking face is integrated into a unified percept. This is demonstrated in the McGurk effect, in which discrepant visual articulation changes the auditory perception of a consonant. We studied acoustic (A) and visual (V) phonetic features that contribute to audiovisual speech perception by measuring the McGurk effect in two vowel contexts, [a]...

In simulations of electrical-acoustic stimulation (EAS), vocoded speech intelligibility is aided by preservation of low-frequency acoustic cues. However, the speech signal is often interrupted in everyday listening conditions, and effects of interruption on hybrid speech intelligibility are poorly understood. Additionally, listeners rely on information-bearing acoustic changes to understand ful...

Advancements in oceanic research have resulted in a plethora of activities such as undersea oil/gas exploration, environmental monitoring, sonar-based coastal surveillance, which have each increased the acoustic noise levels in the ocean and have raised concerns in the scientific community about the effect of human-generated sounds on marine life. Knowledge of the statistical characteristics of...

The purpose of the present study was to evaluate communication ability in noise at two signal presentation levels when using acoustic and electronic hearing protection devices (HPDs). Fourteen normal hearing subjects were fitted binaurally with custom acoustic HPDs (ER-15) and custom electronic HPDs (Starkey SA T9). Probe microphone measurements were obtained on 28 ears for three experimental c...

Adaptive beamformers have been proposed as noise reduction schemes for conventional hearing aids and cochlear implants. A method to predict the amount of noise reduction that can be achieved by a two-microphone adaptive beamformer is presented. The prediction is based on a model of the acoustic environment in which the presence of one acoustic target-signal source and one acoustic noise source ...

In this study we improve the performance of a hybrid connectionist speech recognition system by incorporating visual information about the corresponding lip movements. Speciically, we investigate the beneets of adding visual features in the presence of additive noise and crosstalk (cocktail party eeect). Our study extends previous experiments by using a new visual front end, and an alternative ...

This paper proposes an acoustic event detection (AED) method using semi-supervised non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) with a mixture of local dictionaries (MLD). The proposed method based on semi-supervised NMF newly introduces a noise dictionary and a noise activation matrix both dedicated to unknown acoustic atoms which are not included in the MLD. Because unknown acoustic atoms are bett...