Measures of Intelligibility, Continued
The STI Method | As described in Chapter 2, speech consists of the frequency of the sound being uttered and the |
| amplitude modulation of that sound into the phonemes that create words. The STI (Speech |
| Transmission Index) method measures the modulation transfer function for 14 modulation |
| frequency bands spaced at |
| bands from 125 Hz to 8 KHz. These 98 measurement points (7 x 14) are weighted and combined |
| to create a number between 0.0 (totally unintelligible) and 1.0 (perfectly intelligible). The |
| standardization of the carriers and modulation frequencies to be used, as well as the weighting to |
| be applied, has now been standardized by IEC |
| all intelligibility measures, however the procedure can take as long as 20 minutes per test. |
| Alternate methods such as STIpa, STITEL, and RASTI (described below) are subsets of the |
| STI method with faster measurement times. |
STIpa | This is a special adaptation of the STI method for the measurement of speech intelligibility for |
| public address (PA) systems. It is a modification to the STI method that has been correlated to |
| within +/- 0.03 CIS of a full STI measurement. The STIpa method is implemented in the |
| Simplex/GoldLine intelligibility measurement system. |
STITEL | The STITEL method is a special adaptation of the STI method used for the measurement of speech |
| intelligibility for telephone systems. It reduces the 14 modulation frequencies to seven and applies |
| one to each of the seven octave bands simultaneously. |
RASTI | The Rapid Acoustics Speech Transmission Index (RASTI) is a simplified version of the STI |
| method that uses two octave bands instead of seven with four modulation frequencies measured in |
| one band and five in the other, for a total of nine measurements. |
Percent (%) ALcons | The “Articulation Loss of Consonants” (ALcons) is a measurement method for speech |
| intelligibility that is based upon the importance of consonant sounds in the overall perception of |
| speech. It uses specially chosen simple words in transmission tests. ALcons is expressed in |
| percent (%ALcons). This is a subjective test with a much greater potential for variations in score |
| than some of the other tests described. |
Phonetically
Balanced Word
Scores
The Phonetically Balance (PB) word score is described in ISO/TR 4870, and consists of specially chosen words selected from a known population transmitted to a panel of listeners. This is a subjective test with a much greater potential for variations in score than some of the other tests described.