Preliminary analyses of speech sounds with a digital model of the ear

We believe that current lack of simple, invariant relations between the acoustic description of speech sounds and their phonetic features is due, in part, to the failure of current analyzers to adequately model the analysis performed by the auditory system. Our approach is to use models of the outer, middle, and inner ears for speech analysis. The sound‐field‐to‐stapes velocity transformation is simulated with a digital filter consisting of two complex‐conjugate pole pairs with center frequencies of 2.4 and 4.0 kHz and bandwidths of 0.7 and 2.0 kHz, respectively. This filter is consistent with descriptions of the outer ear provided by Shaw and of the middle ear by Zwislocki. The stapes is then used to drive a digital, 50‐section implementation of the two‐dimensional cochlear model developed by Spenner and Cox. Because the solutions of the model are in the time domain, its transient response is included in the speech‐wave analysis and the need for arbitrary data windows and assumptions of periodicity are e...