A Basic Experiment on Time-Varying Speech Quality

We present a general formulation of a basic open question regarding the perception of time-varying speech quality. We then describe the design, implementation, conduct, and analysis of a practical experiment that addresses a small but fundamental part of that open question. In this experiment, listeners rate the overall speech quality of single sentence stimuli that contain two different levels of nominal speech quality and two transitions between these levels. We present several results including those related to human integration of speech quality and the recency effect. Finally, we discuss these results and suggest potential additional work that might build upon them.

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