In this paper we present and validate a freely available MATLAB Toolbox for imposing speech signal impairments similar to those occurring in real-world telecommunication systems. The purpose of the toolbox is to facilitate research on the perception of different dimensions of speech quality and their relation to technical system properties. In that context the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is working on the annotation method P.TCA, which enables expert listeners to identify the technical cause for an observed speech signal impairment. Our contribution addresses one current challenge of P.TCA: it was found out that providing written definitions of speech degradations without exemplary listening material is not sufficient to be reliably understood by annotators. To address this issue and make the schema accessible for a wide range of users, this paper describes a systematic approach to generate and validate such exemplary listening material. A validation experiment shows that experts can identify more than half of the processed examples correctly and it encourages further research towards improving the P.TCA procedure as well as the processing algorithms.
https://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=17993
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