Re: Huggins pitch with speech?

[John Culling <cullingj@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Michael

My recollection of Schroeder's patent is that it is not quite as
you may imagine. However, I attempted to generate speech
purely through binaural interaction some years back and 
published the results in JASA

http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.2140806

Intelligibility was less than 10% for IEEE sentences. 
The best transcript from the entire study was "we all have 
a new dayâs decision" for "we now have a new  base for shipping"
There are probably two reasons why we did not get very good 
intelligibility with purely binaural information.

First, binaural unmasking is only effective at low frequencies
(<1500 Hz). Consequently the stimuli all sounded low-pass
filtered or like someone mumbling indistinctly.

Second, our ideas at that time of what constituted binaural 
information were probably incorrect. The stimuli were designed
to match the spectrotemporal variation in interaural correlation
induced by the presence of the speech. Later experiments
(also in JASA) suggest to me that the binaural system in fact 
works from the residue of interaural cancellation.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.2785035

One might think, "OK let's manipulate that instead", but it
is somewhat more difficult to independently control.
One either has to allow the overal stimulus to retain some
monaural spectrotemporal modulation (unlike a Huggins pitch) 
or the "noise" has to be allowed to modulate out-of-phase
with the speech, which is rather unecological, but would
at least give an unambiguous result - I haven't tried it, but 
the first problem would still need to be addressed.

I may still have the stimuli somewhere, but be prepared for
disappointment!

John.

>>> Michael BuschermÃhle             <m.buschermoehle@xxxxxxxxxxx> 28 September 2012 13:31:03 >>>
Dear list,

I just recently stumbled upon the following book chapter by Manfred
Schroeder:

http://books.google.de/books?id=cg7x5_-vB-AC&pg=PA190&lpg=PA190&dq=manfred+schr%C3%B6der+huggins+pitch&source=bl&ots=tjbeher3kK&sig=TDtA5RUN1VLztWX55rKwKy-Hy_Q&hl=de&sa=X&ei=n1xkUOXhDsPOtAaeo4CoBw&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=manfred%20schr%C3%B6der%20huggins%20pitch&f=false


In that chapter (Chapter 10.6) he explains that an effect similar to the
Huggins pitch can also be evoked with speech (i.e. you have two
unintelligible mono noise signals that reveal intelligible speech if you
listen binaurally). As far as I understand this should be different
(albeit related) to the BMLD effect.

Manfred Schroeder cites the following patent which is supposed to be
able to generate this effect:

http://www.ptodirect.com/Patents/3328526 

Does anyone know a sound sample or even a piece of source code that
demonstrates this effect? I think it would be a wonderful effect to
demonstrate the fascinating binaural processing that goes on in our brains.

Thanks in advance for any reply!

With kind regards,
Michael.


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