Much of our daily communication occurs in the presence of background noise, compromising our ability to hear. While understanding speech in noise is a challenge for everyone, it becomes increasingly difficult as we age. Although aging is generally accompanied by hearing loss, this perceptual decline cannot fully account for the difficulties experienced by older adults for hearing in noise. Decr...

Musicians have lifelong experience parsing melodies from background harmonies, which can be considered a process analogous to speech perception in noise. To investigate the effect of musical experience on the neural representation of speech-in-noise, we compared subcortical neurophysiological responses to speech in quiet and noise in a group of highly trained musicians and nonmusician controls....

A new analysis of perceptual speech enhancement is presented. It focuses on the fact that if only noise above the masking threshold is filtered, then noise below the masking threshold, but above the absolute threshold of hearing, can become audible after the masker filtering. This particular drawback of some perceptual filters, hereafter called the maskee-to-audible-noise (MAN) phenomenon, favo...

Much of our daily communication occurs in the presence of background noise, compromising our ability to hear. While understanding speech in noise is a challenge for everyone, it becomes increasingly difficult as we age. Although aging is generally accompanied by hearing loss, this perceptual decline cannot fully account for the difficulties experienced by older adults for hearing in noise. Decr...

Over the past few decades, there has been an increasing number of musical instruments and works of sound art that incorporate robotics and mechatronics. This paper proposes a new approach in classification of such works and focuses on those whose ideological roots can be sought in Luigi Russolo’s noise-intoners (intonarumori). It presents a discussion on works in which mechatronics is used to i...

Congenital amusia is a neurodevelopmental disorder of musical processing that also impacts subtle aspects of speech processing. It remains debated at what stage(s) of auditory processing deficits in amusia arise. In this study, we investigated whether amusia originates from impaired subcortical encoding of speech (in quiet and noise) and musical sounds in the brainstem. Fourteen Cantonese-speak...

This paper focuses on the underdetermined blind source separation (BSS) of three speech signals mixed in a real environment from measurements provided by two sensors. To date, solutions to the underdetermined BSS problem have mainly been based on the assumption that the speech signals are sufficiently sparse. They involve designing binary masks that extract signals at time-frequency points wher...

The multi{resolution sinusoidal transform (MRST) 1] provides a sparse representation for speech signals by utilizing several psychoacoustic phenomena. It is well suited to applications in signal enhancement because the signal is represented in a parametric manner that is easy to manipulate. The MRST has the additional advantage that it is both particularly well suited to typical speech signals ...

The sinusoidal transform (ST) provides a sparse representation for speech signals by utilizing several psychoacoustic phenomena. It is well suited to applications in signal enhancement because the signal is represented in a parametric manner that is easy to manipulate. The multi{resolution sinusoidal transform (MRST) has the additional advantage that it is both particularly well suited to typic...