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The role of pitch and harmonic cancellation when listening to speech in background sounds
Abstract   Peer reviewed

The role of pitch and harmonic cancellation when listening to speech in background sounds

Daniel Guest and Andrew J. Oxenham
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Vol.144(3 Suppl), pp.1835-1835
09/2018
DOI: 10.1121/1.5068085

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Abstract

Fundamental frequency (F0) differences between competing talkers can aid their perceptual segregation (ΔF0 benefit), but the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. One theory of ΔF0 benefit, harmonic cancellation, proposes that the periodicity of the masker can be used to cancel (i.e., filter out) its neural representation. Earlier work suggested that a one-octave ΔF0 provided little benefit, an effect predicted by harmonic cancellation due to the shared periodicity of the masker and target. An alternative explanation is that this effect is simply due to spectral overlap between the target and masker. To assess these competing explanations, speech intelligibility of a monotonized target talker masked by a speech-shaped harmonic complex tone was measured as a function of ΔF0 (0, + 3, + 12, + 15 semitones) and spectral structure of the masker (all harmonics, odd harmonics only). We found that removal of the masker’s even harmonics when the target F0 was one octave higher than the masker improved speech reception thresholds by about 6 dB. Because this manipulation eliminated spectral overlap between target and masker components but did not alter their shared periodicity, the finding is consistent with the explanation based on spectral overlap, but not cancellation. [Work supported by NIH R01DC005216 and NSF NRT-UtB1734815 grants.]

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