Qinglin Meng

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Associate) at South China University of Technology

Speech perception has been extensively studied using degradation algorithms such as channel vocoding, mosaic speech, and pointillistic speech. Here, an “atomic speech model” is introduced to generate unique sparse time-frequency patterns. It processes speech signals using a bank of bandpass filters, undersamples the signals, and reproduces each sam...

Objective: Automated pure-tone audiometry (PTA) conducted outside a sound booth is heavily affected by environmental noise. This study aims to evaluate the performance of an automated PTA system, employing commercially available true wireless stereo earbuds with active noise cancellation (ANC) in noisy environments. Design: The electroacoustic c...

Spatial hearing ability enables people with normal hearing to localize a sound source and utilizes the cocktail party effect to detect the target speech information in a noise environment. Hearing-impairment causes not only hearing loss but also the degradation of spatial auditory ability. Hearing aid is desired to improve the spatial auditory abil...

Sound localization is an essential ability for normal hearing listeners, aiding in the localization of objects and the detection of potential dangers, as well as enabling the extraction of target speech information in a noisy environment. However, high-frequency hearing loss, commonly observed in the elderly population, may lead to a decline in spa...

Objectives Motivated by the growing need for hearing screening in China, the present study has two objectives. First, to develop and validate a new test, called the Chinese Zodiac-in-noise (ZIN) test, for large-scale hearing screening in China. Second, to conduct a large-scale remote hearing screening in China, using the ZIN test developed. Design...

Perception with electric neuroprostheses is sometimes expected to be simulated using properly designed physical stimuli. Here, we examined a new acoustic vocoder model for electric hearing with cochlear implants (CIs) and hypothesized that comparable speech encoding can lead to comparable perceptual patterns for CI and normal hearing (NH) listeners...

Cochlear implant (CI) recipients face great challenges in speech-in-noise recognition, partially due to the fact that only temporal envelopes from a limited number of bands are preserved in most CI signal processing strategies. In “n-of-m” strategies (e.g., the Advanced Combinational Encoder, ACE), the number of maxima (nmax) and electrical dynamic...

Despite pitch being considered the primary cue for discriminating lexical tones, there are secondary cues such as loudness contour and duration, which may allow some cochlear implant (CI) tone discrimination even with severely degraded pitch cues. To isolate pitch cues from other cues, we developed a new disyllabic word stimulus set (Di) whose prim...

Modern cochlear implants (CIs) generate electric current pulsatile stimuli from real-time incoming to stimulate residual auditory nerves of deaf ears. In this unique way, deaf people can (re)gain a sense of hearing and consequent speech communication abilities. The electric hearing mimics the normal acoustic hearing (NH), but with a different physi...

The temporal-limits-encoder (TLE) strategy has been proposed to enhance the representation of temporal fine structure (TFS) in cochlear implants (CIs), which is vital for many aspects of sound perception but is typically discarded by most modern CI strategies. TLE works by computing an envelope modulator that is within the temporal pitch limits of...

The head orientation of the listener significantly affects speech intelligibility (SI) in automobiles due to the effect of binaural listening and special acoustic conditions such as early reflections and seat-back occlusions. However, this issue has not been studied with subjective tests yet. This study investigates SI with various head orientation...

Acoustic simulations of cochlear implants allow comprehensive evaluation of not only perceptual performance under impoverished listening conditions but also relative contributions of classical spectral and temporal cues to speech recognition. Conventional simulations use continuous sinusoidal or noise carriers, lacking the vital pulsatile character...

True wireless stereo (TWS) earbuds have become popular and widespread in recent years, and numerous automated pure-tone audiometer applications have been developed for portable devices. However, most of these applications require specifically designed earphones to which the public may not have access. Therefore, the present study investigates the a...

The cochlea plays a key role in the transmission from acoustic vibration to neural stimulation upon which the brain perceives the sound. A cochlear implant (CI) is an auditory prosthesis to replace the damaged cochlear hair cells to achieve acoustic-to-neural conversion. However, the CI is a very coarse bionic imitation of the normal cochlea. The h...

As well as background noise and the acoustic conditions of the given space, speech intelligibility (SI) is affected by the binaural effect (BE), which is sensitive to the head orientation (HO) of the listener, especially in a small enclosed space such as an automobile. This study uses the speech transmission index (STI) to systematically investigat...

No PDF available ABSTRACT Pitch perception remains a challenge for cochlear-implant (CI) users. Temporal periodicity, as the main cue for pitch, could not be finely encoded by current CI strategies that transmit envelopes only and discard the temporal fine structure (TFS). Moreover, temporal electric pitch percept saturates at a few hundred hertz,...

Speech signals have a unique shape of long-term modulation spectrum that is distinct from environmental noise, music, and non-speech vocalizations. Does the human auditory system adapt to the speech long-term modulation spectrum and efficiently extract critical information from speech signals? To answer this question, we tested whether neural respo...

The difference in binaural benefit between bilateral cochlear implant (CI) users and normal hearing (NH) listeners has typically been attributed to CI sound coding strategies not encoding the acoustic fine structure (FS) interaural time differences (ITD). The Temporal Limits Encoder (TLE) strategy has been proposed as a way of improving binaural he...

No PDF available ABSTRACT To enhance the mostly discarded temporal fine structure in modern cochlear implant (CI) strategies, a temporal-limits-encoder (TLE) strategy was proposed by downshifting the high-frequency-band-limited signal to a low-frequency-temporal-pitch-limits range of CIs [Meng et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am.(2016)]. This study investig...

No PDF available ABSTRACT Amounts of automated pure tone audiometer applications have been developed for personal terminals in recent years. However, most of them require specifically designed headphones, which are usually expensive and not accessible to most people. The commercially available true wireless stereos earbuds (e.g., Honor Flypods and...

No PDF available ABSTRACT Natural speech signals are continuous and have great redundancy in time, which is learned by human beings and guarantees speech comprehension even in challenging circumstances. This work develops a sound synthesis method to study some time-related characteristics of the human auditory system. The temporal information withi...

The cochlea “translates” the in-air vibrational acoustic “language” into the spikes of neural “language” that are then transmitted to the brain for auditory understanding and/or perception. During this intracochlear “translation” process, high resolution in time–frequency–intensity domains guarantees the high quality of the input neural information...

Cochlear implants (CIs) convert sound to electrical stimulation by extracting the envelope in each frequency band while discarding the temporal fine structure (TFS). This processing removes the fine structure interaural time differences (ITDs), which are an important cue for locating sounds on the horizontal plane in normal-hearing (NH) listeners,...

Classic channel vocoders have been widely used for simulating cochlear implants (CIs). However, some important features of state-of-the-art CI strategies were usually ignored, such as pulsatile current, broad current spread, and low quantization resolution of intensity. To solve this problem, a novel vocoder was proposed, which is combined from Gau...

Currently, there is controversy around whether rats can use interaural time differences (ITDs) to localize sound. Here, naturalistic pulse train stimuli were used to evaluate the rat's sensitivity to onset and ongoing ITDs using a two-alternative forced choice sound lateralization task. Pulse rates between 50 Hz and 4.8 kHz with rectangular or Hann...

Channel vocoders have been widely used as acoustic models for current vocoder-centric cochlear implant (CI) signal processing strategies. Previous studies found that 4-to 8-channel vocoded speech in normal hearing (NH) subjects can derive comparable recognition scores to CI subjects who may have 8 to 22 frequency channels. The reasons for this over...

Poster of the corresponding Interspeech paper

Previous investigations found that loudness-contours within individual Mandarin monosyllables can drive categorical perception of Mandarin tone for cochlear implant (CI) users, while in normal hearing (NH) subjects the pitch contour is phonologically acknowledged to be the dominant cue. Here we further examine the weighting strategy of pitch induce...

Temporal envelope-based signal processing strategies are widely used in cochlear-implant(CI) systems. It is well recognized that the inability to convey temporal fine structure (TFS) in the stimuli limits CI users' performance, but it is still unclear how to effectively deliver the TFS. A strategy known as the temporal limits encoder (TLE), wh...

Lexical tone recognition with current cochlear implants (CI) remains unsatisfactory due to significantly degraded pitch-related acoustic cues, which dominate the tone recognition by normal-hearing (NH) listeners. Several secondary cues (e.g., amplitude contour, duration, and spectral envelope) that influence tone recognition in NH listeners and CI...

Cochlear implant (CI) strategies extract multi-channel temporal envelopes to stimulate an array of electrodes. However, temporal pitch perception ability is known to be limited to a low frequency range at single channels. Therefore, this study proposes a temporal limits encoder (TLE) to make full use of the temporal processing abilities at each ind...

Envelope is the vital part of one-dimensional data. The estimation of envelope can be treated as a demodulation problem. However, the definition of envelope is ambiguous and lack of an exact mathematical definition. It is commonly agreed that envelope varies slowly and in some empirical view it should pass the prominent peaks of the data smoothly....

In auditory science, Hilbert transform (HT) was used for decomposition of temporal envelope (E) and fine structure (TFS) [1]. Sometimes the envelope is called 'Hilbert envelope'. Although HT has rigorous mathematical definition, it has little intrinsic physical relationship with E or TFS. Aims to investigate the rationality of that method for E or...

Cochlea, known as `fourier analyzer' in auditory system of mammals, codes the mechanical wave to electrical signals tonotopically. Meanwhile, the auditory coder also works in temporal mode, where envelope (E, i.e. amplitude modulation (AM)) and temporal fine structure (TFS, i.e. frequency modulation (FM)) are both significant but not exactly define...

Current experimental Cochlear Implant (CI) sound processing strategies like F0mod [Laneau, et.al., 2006], which aim to improve the pitch perception of CI subjects, amplitude-modulate the envelope of each frequency channel by the fundamental frequency (F0) of the speech sound. Due to the hardware limitation of CI devices, typical F0 estimation algor...

Pitch perception researches showed that temporal modulation plays an important role in pitch perception from unresolved harmonics. Fundamental frequency (F0) enhancement through temporal modulation of envelope was utilized in some cochlear implant (CI) signal processing strategies [e.g., Laneau, et.al., 2006] to improve the pitch perception of CI....

The aim of this study was to investigate the relative contribution of temporal and spectral cues to melodic contour identification (MCI). Ten normal-hearing subjects participated in this study. Acoustic stimuli from four instruments and synthetic complex tone were utilized. A noise-excited vocoder was used to extract the temporal and spectral infor...

The aim of this study was to determine how melodic contour identification with cochlear implant was affected by the frequency range, timbre and intonation. Noise-excited vocoder was used to simulate the signal processing for cochlear implant system. Melodic contour identification tests were carried out with eight normal-hearing subjects. Stimuli fr...

The present study investigated musical pitch discrimination with acoustic simulation of cochlear implant. A 4-channel noise-excited vocoder was used to simulate the signal processing of cochlear implants. Eight normal-hearing subjects participated in this study. Psychoacoustic experiments on pitch-direction discrimination test were carried out to e...