Intermodulation distortion: a controllable parameter in the analysis of the intelligibility of clipped speech

• Main Author: Lannes, William Joseph
• Other Authors: Ewing, Gerald D.
• Language: en_US
• Published: Monterey, California. U.S. Naval Postgraduate School 2012
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10945/9541

Until the experiments conducted on Single Sideband speech clipping in the early 1960's, very little work had been done in the field of conventional speech processing or clipping since the late 1940's. Although the SSB experiments were mainly motivated by the unique repeaking problem associated with clipped SSB signals, they pointed out that further improvements in intelligibility of clipped speech were still possible. Perhaps of more importance, these experiments offered experimental evidence that the problem of intelligibility of clipped speech was closely related to the intermodulation distortion produced in the clipping process. This paper is a study of clipped speech as viewed from this point. The relation of the intermodulation distortion to the intelligibility of clipped speech is developed, and it is shown that intelligibility can be enhanced by reduction of the intermodulation products.