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Inharmonic speech reveals the role of harmonicity in the cocktail party problem.

ABSTRACT: The "cocktail party problem" requires us to discern individual sound sources from mixtures of sources. The brain must use knowledge of natural sound regularities for this purpose. One much-discussed regularity is the tendency for frequencies to be harmonically related (integer multiples of a fundamental frequency). To test the role of harmonicity in real-world sound segregation, we developed speech analysis/synthesis tools to perturb the carrier frequencies of speech, disrupting harmonic frequency relations while maintaining the spectrotemporal envelope that determines phonemic content. We find that violations of harmonicity cause individual frequencies of speech to segregate from each other, impair the intelligibility of concurrent utterances despite leaving intelligibility of single utterances intact, and cause listeners to lose track of target talkers. However, additional segregation deficits result from replacing harmonic frequencies with noise (simulating whispering), suggesting additional grouping cues enabled by voiced speech excitation. Our results demonstrate acoustic grouping cues in real-world sound segregation.

SUBMITTER: Popham S

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5974276 | biostudies-literature | 2018 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Inharmonic speech reveals the role of harmonicity in the cocktail party problem.

Popham Sara S Boebinger Dana D Ellis Dan P W DPW Kawahara Hideki H McDermott Josh H JH

Nature communications 20180529 1

The "cocktail party problem" requires us to discern individual sound sources from mixtures of sources. The brain must use knowledge of natural sound regularities for this purpose. One much-discussed regularity is the tendency for frequencies to be harmonically related (integer multiples of a fundamental frequency). To test the role of harmonicity in real-world sound segregation, we developed speech analysis/synthesis tools to perturb the carrier frequencies of speech, disrupting harmonic frequen ...[more]

PMID: 29844313

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Project description:The goal of this study was to investigate how cognitive factors influence performance in a multi-talker, "cocktail-party" like environment in musicians and non-musicians. This was achieved by relating performance in a spatial hearing task to cognitive processing abilities assessed using measures of executive function (EF) and visual attention in musicians and non-musicians. For the spatial hearing task, a speech target was presented simultaneously with two intelligible speech maskers that were either colocated with the target (0° azimuth) or were symmetrically separated from the target in azimuth (at ±15°). EF assessment included measures of cognitive flexibility, inhibition control and auditory working memory. Selective attention was assessed in the visual domain using a multiple object tracking task (MOT). For the MOT task, the observers were required to track target dots (n = 1,2,3,4,5) in the presence of interfering distractor dots. Musicians performed significantly better than non-musicians in the spatial hearing task. For the EF measures, musicians showed better performance on measures of auditory working memory compared to non-musicians. Furthermore, across all individuals, a significant correlation was observed between performance on the spatial hearing task and measures of auditory working memory. This result suggests that individual differences in performance in a cocktail party-like environment may depend in part on cognitive factors such as auditory working memory. Performance in the MOT task did not differ between groups. However, across all individuals, a significant correlation was found between performance in the MOT and spatial hearing tasks. A stepwise multiple regression analysis revealed that musicianship and performance on the MOT task significantly predicted performance on the spatial hearing task. Overall, these findings confirm the relationship between musicianship and cognitive factors including domain-general selective attention and working memory in solving the "cocktail party problem".

Dataset Information

Inharmonic speech reveals the role of harmonicity in the cocktail party problem.

Publications

Inharmonic speech reveals the role of harmonicity in the cocktail party problem.

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