TY - JOUR
T1 - Acoustical correlates of performance on a dynamic range compression discrimination task
AU - Sabin, Andrew T.
AU - Gallun, Frederick J.
AU - Souza, Pamela E.
N1 - Funding Information:
Efoe Nyatepe-Coo and Alex Evanoff helped with data collected. Morten Jepsen, Eric Hoover and Richard Wright provided helpful conversations in the development of this work. This work was funded by NIH grant DC60014 and by the Department of Veterans Affairs, Veterans Health Administration, Rehabilitation Research and Development Service (Center of Excellence Award C4844C).
PY - 2013/9
Y1 - 2013/9
N2 - Dynamic range compression is widely used to reduce the difference between the most and least intense portions of a signal. Such compression distorts the shape of the amplitude envelope of a signal, but it is unclear to what extent such distortions are actually perceivable by listeners. Here, the ability to distinguish between compressed and uncompressed versions of a noise vocoded sentence was initially measured in listeners with normal hearing while varying the threshold, ratio, attack, and release parameters. This narrow condition was selected in order to characterize perception under the most favorable listening conditions. The average behavioral sensitivity to compression was highly correlated to several acoustical indices of modulation depth. In particular, performance was highly correlated to the Euclidean distance between the modulation spectra of the uncompressed and compressed signals. Suggesting that this relationship is not restricted to the initial test conditions, the correlation remained largely unchanged both (1) when listeners with normal hearing were tested using a time-compressed version of the original signal, and (2) when listeners with impaired hearing were tested using the original signal. If this relationship generalizes to more ecologically valid conditions, it will provide a straightforward method for predicting the detectability of compression-induced distortions.
AB - Dynamic range compression is widely used to reduce the difference between the most and least intense portions of a signal. Such compression distorts the shape of the amplitude envelope of a signal, but it is unclear to what extent such distortions are actually perceivable by listeners. Here, the ability to distinguish between compressed and uncompressed versions of a noise vocoded sentence was initially measured in listeners with normal hearing while varying the threshold, ratio, attack, and release parameters. This narrow condition was selected in order to characterize perception under the most favorable listening conditions. The average behavioral sensitivity to compression was highly correlated to several acoustical indices of modulation depth. In particular, performance was highly correlated to the Euclidean distance between the modulation spectra of the uncompressed and compressed signals. Suggesting that this relationship is not restricted to the initial test conditions, the correlation remained largely unchanged both (1) when listeners with normal hearing were tested using a time-compressed version of the original signal, and (2) when listeners with impaired hearing were tested using the original signal. If this relationship generalizes to more ecologically valid conditions, it will provide a straightforward method for predicting the detectability of compression-induced distortions.
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U2 - 10.1121/1.4816410
DO - 10.1121/1.4816410
M3 - Article
C2 - 23967944
AN - SCOPUS:84883380279
SN - 0001-4966
VL - 134
SP - 2136
EP - 2147
JO - Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
JF - Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
IS - 3
ER -