Effects of time compression and time compression plus reverberation on the intelligibility of Northwestern University...

The Tonal and Speech Materials for Auditory Perceptual Assessment, Disc 1.0 audio compact disc developed in 1992 includes several sets of degraded speech materials, two of which, time compression and reverberation, are described in this paper. The digital techniques used to compress the NU No. 6 materials (female speaker) on an 80386-based computer are described, along with a series of experiments on subjects with normal hearing that document the effects of the time compression on recognition performance. Experiment I examined at 70 dB SPL the effect on word recognition of 45, 55, 65, 70, and 75 percent compressions. Experiment II developed psychometric functions for the 45, 65, and 75 percent time-compression conditions. Experiment III defined the effects that time-compression degradation (45% and 65%) plus reverberation degradation (0.3 sec) had on the recognition performance on the NU No. 6 materials. Based on the experiments, four conditions (45% compression, 65% compression, 45% compression plus 0.3-sec reverberation, and 65% compression plus 0.3-sec reverberation) were selected and recorded on the compact disc. In the compact disc trials, normative data on the four conditions were developed from 120 listeners with normal hearing.