An experimental investigation of the perceptual effects of altering the zero-crossings of a speech signal

This paper presents the results of an experimental investigation of the effects of altering the zero-crossings of a speech signal. In the experiments reported, the intelligibility degradation of clipped filtered speech subjected to averaging and reordering of the zero-crossing interval sequence is presented. The results from these experiments provide an interesting perspective on the relative importance of zero-crossing locations and zero-crossing intervals for speech perception. A conclusion of this study is that the set of zero-crossings of a speech waveform represents a near minimal set of informational attributes in the sense that any reordering or averaging of the zero-crossing intervals has a significant detrimental effect upon speech intelligibility.