• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.91-100
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• 2023

Reverberation time (T60) is a typical acoustic parameter that provides information about reverberation. Since the impacts of reverberation vary depending on the frequency bands even in the same space, frequency-dependent (FD) T60, which offers detailed insights into the acoustic environments, can be useful. However, most conventional blind T60 estimation methods, which estimate the T60 from speech signals, focus on fullband T60 estimation, and a few blind FDT60 estimation methods commonly show poor performance in the low-frequency bands. This paper introduces a modified approach based on Attentive pooling based Weighted Sum of Spectral Decay Rates (AWSSDR), previously proposed for blind T60 estimation, by extending its target from fullband T60 to FDT60. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms conventional blind FDT60 estimation methods on the acoustic characterization of environments (ACE) challenge evaluation dataset. Notably, it consistently exhibits excellent estimation performance in all frequency bands. This demonstrates that the mechanism of the AWSSDR method is valuable for blind FDT60 estimation because it reflects the FD variations in the impact of reverberation, aggregating information about FDT60 from the speech signal by processing the spectral decay rates associated with the physical properties of reverberation in each frequency band.