D. Timothy Ives

Discrimination of speaker size from syllable phrases.

The length of the vocal tract is correlated with speaker size and, so, speech sounds have information about the size of the speaker in a form that is interpretable by the listener. A wide range of different vocal tract lengths exist in the population and humans are able to distinguish speaker size from the speech. Smith et al. [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 117, 305-318 (2005)] presented vowel sounds to listeners and showed that the ability to discriminate speaker size extends beyond the normal range of speaker sizes which suggests that information about the size and shape of the vocal tract is segregated automatically at an early stage in the processing. This paper reports an extension of the size discrimination research using a much larger set of speech sounds, namely, 180 consonant-vowel and vowel-consonant syllables. Despite the pronounced increase in stimulus variability, there was actually an improvement in discrimination performance over that supported by vowel sounds alone. Performance with vowel-consonant syllables was slightly better than with consonant-vowel syllables. These results support the hypothesis that information about the length of the vocal tract is segregated at an early stage in auditory processing.

Neural Representation of Auditory Size in the Human Voice and in Sounds from Other Resonant Sources

Summary The size of a resonant source can be estimated by the acoustic-scale information in the sound [1–3]. Previous studies revealed that posterior superior temporal gyrus (STG) responds to acoustic scale in human speech when it is controlled for spectral-envelope change (unpublished data). Here we investigate whether the STG activity is specific to the processing of acoustic scale in human voice or whether it reflects a generic mechanism for the analysis of acoustic scale in resonant sources. In two functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments, we measured brain activity in response to changes in acoustic scale in different categories of resonant sound (human voice, animal call, and musical instrument). We show that STG is activated bilaterally for spectral-envelope changes in general; it responds to changes in category as well as acoustic scale. Activity in left posterior STG is specific to acoustic scale in human voices and not responsive to acoustic scale in other resonant sources. In contrast, the anterior temporal lobe and intraparietal sulcus are activated by changes in acoustic scale across categories. The results imply that the human voice requires special processing of acoustic scale, whereas the anterior temporal lobe and intraparietal sulcus process auditory size information independent of source category.

Pitch strength decreases as F0 and harmonic resolution increase in complex tones composed exclusively of high harmonics.

A melodic pitch experiment was performed to demonstrate the importance of time-interval resolution for pitch strength. The experiments show that notes with a low fundamental (75 Hz) and relatively few resolved harmonics support better performance than comparable notes with a higher fundamental (300 Hz) and more resolved harmonics. Two four note melodies were presented to listeners and one note in the second melody was changed by one or two semitones. Listeners were required to identify the note that changed. There were three orthogonal stimulus dimensions: F0 (75 and 300 Hz); lowest frequency component (3, 7, 11, or 15); and number of harmonics (4 or 8). Performance decreased as the frequency of the lowest component increased for both F0s, but performance was better for the lower F0. The spectral and temporal information in the stimuli were compared using a time-domain model of auditory perception. It is argued that the distribution of time intervals in the auditory nerve can explain the decrease in performance as F0, and spectral resolution increase. Excitation patterns based on the same time-interval information do not contain sufficient resolution to explain listeners performance on the melody task.

Age-related difference in melodic pitch perception is probably mediated by temporal processing: empirical and computational evidence.

Objective: This study was designed to examine whether age-related differences in melodic pitch perception may be mediated by temporal processing. Temporal models of pitch suggest that performance will decline as the lowest component of a complex tone increases in frequency, regardless of age. In addition, if there are age-related deficits in temporal processing in older adults, this group may have reduced performance relative to younger adults even in the most favorable conditions. Design: Six younger adults and 10 older adults with clinically normal audiograms up to 8 kHz were tested in a melodic pitch perception task. In each trial, two consecutive four-note melodies were presented to the listener. Melodies were identical with the exception of one note in the second melody that was shifted in pitch. The listener was required to identify which note was shifted. All notes consisted of eight successive harmonic components, with the average lowest component manipulated to be the 4th, 8th, or 12th component of the harmonic series, with lower components being absent. Results: Age-related differences in melodic pitch perception were only apparent when stimulus parameters favored temporal processing of pitch. Furthermore, modeling a loss of periodicity coding yielded an outcome consistent with the observed behavioral results. Although younger adults generally outperformed older adults, about one-quarter of the older adults performed at levels that were equivalent to those of younger adults. The only follow-up tests that were able to differentiate these exceptional older adults were tests that would be sensitive to temporal processing: Fundamental frequency difference limens and 500 Hz pure-tone difference limens. In contrast, otoacoustic emissions and high-frequency pure-tone thresholds, which are more commonly associated with spectral processing deficits, were not able to differentiate older exceptional adults from older typical adults. Conclusion: Age-related declines in temporal processing contribute to deficits in melodic pitch perception. However, some exceptional older adults with normal audiograms preserve excellent temporal processing and continue to perform at levels that are typical of younger adults.

Optimal Combination of Neural Temporal Envelope and Fine Structure Cues to Explain Speech Identification in Background Noise

The dichotomy between acoustic temporal envelope (ENV) and fine structure (TFS) cues has stimulated numerous studies over the past decade to understand the relative role of acoustic ENV and TFS in human speech perception. Such acoustic temporal speech cues produce distinct neural discharge patterns at the level of the auditory nerve, yet little is known about the central neural mechanisms underlying the dichotomy in speech perception between neural ENV and TFS cues. We explored the question of how the peripheral auditory system encodes neural ENV and TFS cues in steady or fluctuating background noise, and how the central auditory system combines these forms of neural information for speech identification. We sought to address this question by (1) measuring sentence identification in background noise for human subjects as a function of the degree of available acoustic TFS information and (2) examining the optimal combination of neural ENV and TFS cues to explain human speech perception performance using computational models of the peripheral auditory system and central neural observers. Speech-identification performance by human subjects decreased as the acoustic TFS information was degraded in the speech signals. The model predictions best matched human performance when a greater emphasis was placed on neural ENV coding rather than neural TFS. However, neural TFS cues were necessary to account for the full effect of background-noise modulations on human speech-identification performance.

Location and acoustic scale cues in concurrent speech recognition.

Location and acoustic scale cues have both been shown to have an effect on the recognition of speech in multi-speaker environments. This study examines the interaction of these variables. Subjects were presented with concurrent triplets of syllables from a target voice and a distracting voice, and asked to recognize a specific target syllable. The task was made more or less difficult by changing (a) the location of the distracting speaker, (b) the scale difference between the two speakers, and/or (c) the relative level of the two speakers. Scale differences were produced by changing the vocal tract length and glottal pulse rate during syllable synthesis: 32 acoustic scale differences were used. Location cues were produced by convolving head-related transfer functions with the stimulus. The angle between the target speaker and the distracter was 0 degrees, 4 degrees, 8 degrees, 16 degrees, or 32 degrees on the 0 degrees horizontal plane. The relative level of the target to the distracter was 0 or -6 dB. The results show that location and scale difference interact, and the interaction is greatest when one of these cues is small. Increasing either the acoustic scale or the angle between target and distracter speakers quickly elevates performance to ceiling levels.

Modelling the Distortion Produced by Cochlear Compression

Lyon (J Acoust Soc Am 130:3893-3904, 2011) has described how a cascade of simple asymmetric resonators (CAR) can be used to simulate the filtering of the basilar membrane and how the gain of the resonators can be manipulated by a feedback network to simulate the fast-acting compression (FAC) characteristic of cochlear processing. When the compression is applied to complex tones, each pair of primary components produces both quadratic and cubic distortion tones (DTs), and the cascade architecture of the CAR-FAC system propagates them down to their appropriate place along the basilar membrane, where they combine additively with each other and any primary components at that frequency. This suggests that CAR-FAC systems might be used to study the role of compressive distortion in the perception of complex sounds and that behavioural measurements of cochlear distortion data might be useful when tuning the parameters of CAR-FAC systems.

Why pitch strength decreases with increasing harmonic number in complex tones

A melodic pitch experiment was performed to demonstrate the importance of temporal resolution for pitch salience. The experiments show that notes with a low fundamental (75 Hz) and relatively few resolved harmonics support better performance than comparable notes with a higher fundamental (300 Hz) and more resolved harmonics. Two four‐note melodies were presented to listeners and one note in the second melody was changed by one or two semitones. Listeners were required to identify the note that changed. There were four orthogonal stimulus dimensions: F0 (75 and 300 Hz), lowest frequency component (3, 7, 11, or 15), number of harmonics (2, 4, or 8), and degree of component rove (1 or 3). Performance decreased as the frequency of the lowest component increased for both F0s, but performance was better for the lower F0. The spectral and temporal information in the stimuli were compared using the Auditory‐Image Model [Bleeck et al., Acta Acust. 90, 781–788 (2004)]. Peaks in the time‐interval profile of the aud...

Hearing relative phases for two harmonic components

There is a new wavelet model of basilar membrane motion which predicts that existing roex and gammatone filterbanks underestimate the interaction of harmonically related components in complex tones. This interaction appears as a modulation of the basilar membrane motion associated with a higher harmonic by the presence of a lower harmonic; the period of the modulation is that of the difference frequency, or the fundamental of the implied harmonic series. The modulation depth is largest for stimuli whose spectra have a similar energy distribution as natural sounds: a high frequency roll‐off of about 12‐dB per octave. The strength of the modulation frequency is dependent on the relative phase of the components, which predicts that listeners will be able to hear a relative phase change. A series of experiments were undertaken to determine the threshold for a change in the relative phase of the components. The results of the experiments show that a change in the relative phase is detectable for components tha...