The speech noise and its spectrum

Abstract

By recording on one magnetic tape the simultaneous utterances of several talkers through several channels, we have obtained a noise that is constant in time and continuous in frequency, and renders the average spectral components of speech more faithfully than other methods hitherto applied. Such speech noises are open to analysis, and their spectra can thus be determined. The advantages of the method are: 1) the integration needed for determining the longtime spectrum can be reduced to a few seconds; 2) the noise can be treated as a statistical noise constant in time; 3) the noise does not contain any line spectrum elements; 4) it improves the signal-to-noise ratio even under a normal force of utterance. It was shown that the speech spectrum of a certain language may be looked upon as being representative of the language in question. Long-time speech spectra obtained by this method were used to compute the average loudness level of a single person. The method can be used to find the characteristic spectra of certain speech sounds and of individual pronunciation.