MACH1: nonuniform time-scale modification of speech

Author

Covell, Michele ; Withgott, Margaret ; Slaney, Malcolm

Author_Institution

Interval Res. Corp., Palo Alto, CA, USA

Volume

1

fYear

1998

fDate

12-15 May 1998

Firstpage

349

Abstract

We propose a new approach to nonuniform time compression, called Mach1, designed to mimic the natural timing of fast speech. At identical overall compression rates, listener comprehension for Mach1-compressed speech increased between 5 and 31 percentage points over that for linearly compressed speech, and the response times dropped by 15%. For rates between 2.5 and 4.2 times real time, there was no significant comprehension loss with increasing Mach1 compression rates. In A-B preference tests, Mach1-compressed speech was chosen 95% of the time. This paper describes the Mach1 technique and our listener-test results

Keywords

data compression; speech intelligibility; speech processing; A-B preference tests; Mach1-compressed speech; comprehension test; compression rates; fast speech timing; linearly compressed speech; listener comprehension; listener-test results; nonuniform time compression; nonuniform time-scale modification; response times; Degradation; Delay; Extraterrestrial measurements; Humans; Milling machines; Natural languages; Speech; Stress measurement; Testing; Timing;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, 1998. Proceedings of the 1998 IEEE International Conference on

Conference_Location

Seattle, WA

ISSN

1520-6149

Print_ISBN

0-7803-4428-6

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICASSP.1998.674439

Filename

674439