A measure of in-synchrony regions in the auditory nerve firing patterns as a basis for speech vocoding

A speech spectrum intensity measure based on temporal non-place modeling of the cat´s auditory nerve firing patterns is introduced where the spectrum intensity values are estimated using timing-synchrony measurements only. The ability of this measure to serve as a speech information carrier was tested psychoacoustically, by integrating the proposed measure into a buzz-hiss type analysis-synthesis vocoder. Informal listening suggests that considerable speech information is preserved when this new measure is used to replace the spectrum analyzer portion of the vocoder.