Quality ratings for frequency-shaped peak-clipped speech

Peak clipping is a common form of distortion in hearing aids and can reduce the subjective quality of the amplified speech. In a typical hearing aid, frequency-response shaping precedes symmetric peak clipping. The effect of peak clipping on speech quality ratings was therefore studied using sentence test materials that were processed using different frequency response contours and then clipped at different clipping thresholds. The quality of each processed sentence was rated on a ten-point scale by normal-hearing subjects. The experimental results indicate that the clipping threshold, and the interaction of the frequency-response shaping with the clipping threshold, significantly affect speech quality. It is also shown that the distortion effects on speech quality can be modeled by a distortion index computed from the magnitude-squared coherence of the speech-processing system in response to a shaped-noise input signal.