On the significance of phase in the short term Fourier spectrum for speech intelligibility

Abstract

This paper investigates the significance of the magnitude or the phase in the short term Fourier spectrum for speech intelligibility as a function of the time-window length. For a wide range of window lengths (1/16-2048 ms), two hybrid signals were obtained by a cross-wise combination of the magnitude and phase spectra of speech and white noise. Speech intelligibility data showed the significance of the phase spectrum for longer windows (>256 ms) and for very short windows (<4 ms), and that of the magnitude spectrum for medium-range window lengths. The hybrid signals used in the intelligibility test were analyzed in terms of the preservation of the original narrow-band speech envelopes. Correlations between the narrow-band envelopes of the original speech and the hybrid signals show a similar pattern as a function of window length. This result illustrates the importance of the preservation of narrow-band envelopes for speech intelligibility. The observed significance of the phase spectrum in recovering the narrow-band envelopes for the long term windows and for the very short term windows is discussed.