A Simple Model of Speech Communication and its Application to Intelligibility Enhancement

Abstract—We introduce amodel of communication that includes noise inherent in the message production process as well as noise inherent in the message interpretation process. The production and interpretation noise processes have a fixed signal-to-noise ratio. The resulting system is a simple but effective model of human communication. The model naturally leads to a method to enhance the intelligibility of speech rendered in a noisy environ-ment. State-of-the-art experimental results confirm the practical value of the model. Index Terms—Enhancement, intelligibility, speech. I