Human speech evolved as a robust channel tolerant to high background noise

Evidence

The goal of speech recognition (Rabiner and Juang, 1993) is to capture the acoustic human speech signal and process the spoken language into text. It is one of the biggest challenges in speech technology. Evolution and culture have built speech into a fast and robust communication channel over adverse acoustic channels, tolerant to relatively high background noise levels. Speech is not only a rich container of information added to words and non-speech voices, it also carries the identity, age, and gender about the speaker and prosodic features carrying emotions and other meanings. Additionally, the speed of speech may vary substantially, and the vast number of languages, dialects, and speaking styles and disorders make the problem even more challenging. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 2265

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s noise/soundscape reading: the acoustic robustness of speech against a noisy background is what noise pollution degrades.