Resonance-based decomposition for the manipulation of acoustic cues in speech: An assessment of perceived quality

Abstract

The ultimate objective of this study is to employ a resonance-based decomposition method for the manipulation of acoustic cues in speech. Resonance-based decomposition (Selesnick, 2010) is a newly proposed nonlinear signal analysis method based not on frequency or scale but on resonance; the method is able to decompose a complex non-stationary signal into a `high-resonance' component and a `low-resonance' component using a combination of low- and high- Q-factors. In this study, we conducted a subjective listening experiment on five normal hearing listeners to assess the perceived quality of decomposed components, with the intention of deriving the perceptually relevant combinations of low- and high- Q-factors. Our results show that normal hearing listeners generally rank high-resonance components of speech stimuli higher than low-resonance components. This may be due to a greater salience of perceptually significant formant cues in high-resonance stimuli.