Performance of sinusoidal model based amplitude compression in fluctuating noise

Multichannel amplitude compression processing is used to reduce the level variations of speech to fit the reduced dynamic ranges of listeners with sensorineural hearing loss. This processing, however, can result in smearing of temporal information, artifacts due to spectral discontinuities at fixed channel edges, and spectral flattening due to reduced peak-to-valley ratios. Presented here is an implementation of a time-varying compression processing algorithm based on a sinusoidal speech model. The algorithm provides high-quality fast-acting compression, has time-varying frequency channels, is computationally inexpensive and preserves the important spectral peaks in speech. Preliminary results show better performance in periodically fluctuating noise, demonstrating the ability to respond to transients in speech greater than that from fixed-frequency multichannel compression.