• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 2005.05a
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• pp.176-179
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• 2005

A case-study in classroom acoustics was conducted and the effects of two types(system air conditioner and packaged air conditioner) of air conditioner were investigated. Acoustical measurements were made in two different classrooms. Each classroom has different acoustics showing sound quality of air conditioner. Mental concentration test was conducted to evaluate the effects of air conditioner noise with different sound presure level(dBA). Speech intelligibility test was also planed with adopting Korean phonetic balanced words.

• Journal of KSNVE
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.681-686
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• 1999

In a church, speech intelligibility is very important together with the reverberance for musical activities. In order to obtain the primary data of a acoustical design for churches records were refereed and churches were measured in Europe and Japan. And in the base of measurements, those were judged by subjective hearing test. As some results, it has been found that the room acoustics of churches were different in a country and the reverberation time was perferred two seconds for speech intelligibility. However, although personal deviations were admitted, more long echoes were preferred for the music.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.26 no.1E
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• pp.8-13
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• 2007

It has long been known that high-frequency sensorineural hearing loss (HFHL) can contribute to difficulty in speech understanding by elderly listeners. This study evaluated the relative contribution of HFHL and age to speech understanding. Subjects included adult middle-aged and old groups with normal hearing or with limited HFHL. The Hearing-in-Noise-Test (HINT) was used to measure speech perception performance in quiet and in noise. The middle-aged groups showed significant effects of HFHL for speech intelligibility in quiet and in noise, but the old groups showed the difference in quiet only due to high frequency hearing. The results suggest that HFHL may affect speech intelligibility differently with age and therefore hearing aid selection needs to take into account the influence of age.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.42 no.6
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• pp.544-551
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• 2023

Speech enhancement used to improve the perceptual quality and intelligibility of noise speech has been studied as a method using a complex-valued spectrum that can improve both magnitude and phase in a method using a magnitude spectrum. In this paper, a study was conducted on how to apply attention mechanism to complex-valued spectrum-based speech enhancement systems to further improve the intelligibility and quality of noise speech. The attention is performed based on additive attention and allows the attention weight to be calculated in consideration of the complex-valued spectrum. In addition, the global average pooling was used to consider the importance of the feature map. Complex-valued spectrum-based speech enhancement was performed based on the Deep Complex U-Net (DCUNET) model, and additive attention was conducted based on the proposed method in the Attention U-Net model. The results of the experiments on noise speech in a living room environment showed that the proposed method is improved performance over the baseline model according to evaluation metrics such as Source to Distortion Ratio (SDR), Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ), and Short Time Object Intelligence (STOI), and consistently improved performance across various background noise environments and low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) conditions. Through this, the proposed speech enhancement system demonstrated its effectiveness in improving the intelligibility and quality of noisy speech.

• MALSORI
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• no.48
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• pp.1-17
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• 2003

Among the types of dysarthria, spastic and flaccid types are the most prominent manifestations. The objectives of the present research are (1) to discover the phonetic contrasts that differentiate spastic dysarthria from flaccid dysarthria, (2) to analyze the degrees of predictability of each phonetic contrast for intelligibility in spastic and flaccid dysarthrias and to compare them. The 'phonemic contrast word intelligibility pairs' for dysarthric speakers were tested and proved to be useful for clinical assessment of and research on dysarthria. In the group of spastic type, it showed that initial fricative vs. affricate and front vs. back vowel contrasts are transmitted relatively less effectively than flaccid type. In the group of flaccid type, initial glottal vs null contrast is transmitted less effectively than spastic type. The overall intelligibility of spastic dysarthria was predicted by multiple regression analysis with 88% accuracy by three phonetic contrasts(initial fricative vs. affricate; front vs. back vowels; initial consonant correlates). And the intelligibility of flaccid dysarthria was predicted by two phonetic contrasts(initial nasal vs. stop, front vs. back vowels) with 60% accuracy.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.57-65
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• 2024

Normal pressure hydrocephalus (NPH) is a condition wherein the cerebrospinal pressure in the brain is within the normal range, but the cerebrospinal fluid increases above the normal level, causing ventriculomegaly. In patients with NPH, the articulatory system exhibits reduced mobility and range, which may affect diadochokinesis (DDK) and speech intelligibility. In this study, we investigated the characteristics of DDK, including accurate-token DDK and all-token DDK including inaccurate tokens, in patients with NPH and healthy elderly adults (HE). We also examined the classification accuracy of DDK between the two groups. Finally, we investigated whether there was a correlation between speech intelligibility and DDKs in the NPH group. The results showed that NPH and HE groups differed significantly in both accurate-token DDK and all-token DDK, and their classification accuracy was relatively high. However, there was no correlation between speech intelligibility and DDK. The findings suggest that the DDK is a useful method for sensitively assessing speech motor performance in patients with NPH.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.32 no.4
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• pp.335-345
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• 2013

The present study investigates the effect of the inter-aural level difference(ILD) on the syllable articulation test in classrooms which can be occurred by the absorption of interior surfaces. In order to do this, the sound absorbing materials were installed in the classroom and sound pressure level(SPL) at each ear was measured using binaural recording systems. Also, syllable articulation tests were carried out at a classroom with and without sound absorption materials by 20 students who have normal hearing condition, in order to investigates the effect of the ILD on the speech intelligibility. As a result, it was found that the larger inter-aural level differences was occurred at the nearer positions to lateral walls after sound absorptions were applied to lateral walls in the classroom. At some places, the measured ILD was lager than JND of sound level (3dB). Also, it was shown that the correlation coefficient of inter-aural level difference with the score of syllable test has the significant result(-0.441). Thus, It is concluded that ILD can affect the subjective speech intelligibility in classrooms.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.141-144
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• 2004

Background and Objectives : To compare acoustic, aerodynamic analysis of voice and intelligibility score in patients with near-total laryngectomy and implantation of Provox prothesis. Material and Methods : In order to evaluate the voice characteristics, acoustic, aerodynamic parameter and speech intelligibility were measured in 5 patients after near-total laryngectomy, 5 patients after implantation of Provox prosthesis with total bility were measured in 5 patients after near-total laryngectomy, 5 patients after implantation of Provox prosthesis with total laryngectomy and 10 adults normal speaker. Acoustic analysis was carried out using CSL and aerodynamic analysis was carried out using Aerophon II. Speech sample was recorded and 10 listener was scored for speech intelligibility using a percentage of words correctly identified. Results. Fundamental frequency($F_0$), intensity, jitter, shimmer, maximal phonation time(MPT), subglottic air pressure were used for parameters for voice analysis. There were no significant difference between two group except on fundamental frequency and shimmer. The fundamental frequency was higher in patients with near-total laryngectomy and shimmer was higher in patients after implantation of Provox prosthesis with total laryngectomy. In addition, speech intelligibility was no significant difference between two groups. Conclusion : This results confirm that near-total laryngectomy and implantation of Provox prosthesis provides good voice rehabilitation.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.17 no.6
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• pp.1061-1068
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• 2012

This paper deals with a noise reduction algorithm which uses the binary masking approach in the time-frequency domain to improve speech intelligibility. In the binary masking approach, the noise-corrupted speech is decomposed into time-frequency units. Noise-dominant time-frequency units are removed by setting the corresponding binary masks as "0"s and target-dominant units are retained untouched by assigning mask "1"s. We propose a binary mask estimation by comparing the local signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) to a threshold. The local SNR is estimated by a training-based approach. An optimal threshold is proposed, which is obtained from observing the distribution of the training database. The proposed method is evaluated by normal-hearing subjects and the intelligibility scores are computed by counting the number of words correctly recognized.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.32 no.3
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• pp.214-226
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• 2013

Assessing the quality of audio signals is an important consideration in making high quality sounds and various methods have been developed. This paper provides a general framework of sound quality and a technical overview of the international standard methods which are described in ITU-T, ITU-R, IEC and ANSI Recommendations in the speech intelligibility, speech quality, and audio quality areas. In addition, some recent findings and future works are included.