Method to control the amount of “musical” noise for speech quality assessments

Abstract

This study presents a method of adding to clean speech signals a controlled degree of “musical” noise distortions that mimic typical artefacts of speech enhancement systems. The resulting distorted speech signals were evaluated with respect to listening effort and sound quality in subjective listening tests and via model predictions. Both subjective ratings and model prediction outcomes covered the entire rating scale from “excellent”/ “no effort” to “bad”/ “extreme effort”, respectively, in a consistent way. The proposed method proved to be useful for systematic assessments of “musical” noise distortions for the conditions tested in this study.

Keywords

• musical noise
• spectral subtraction
• noise reduction
• distortions
• listening effort
• sound quality