A study on discomfort reduction based on auditory masking of multiple spectral peaks for Infant Cry

摘要

Infant Cry, which is defined the cry of infants who are 0 to 5 years, may be recognized as a noise because Infant Cry gives stress to their circumference and is cause of mother’s childcare stress. Therefore it is important to reduce discomfort of Infant Cry. In this paper, we therefore propose a method to reduce discomfort of Infant Cry based on auditory masking. We have previously proposed a discomfort reduction for stationary noises with a single spectral peak based on auditory masking. In the previous method, the single spectral peak of the stationary noise is analyzed to design a masker signal with critical band in auditory masking. Stationary noises have a stationary spectral peak, thus it is sufficient to analyze stationary noise and detect a spectral peak by frame with all the time. On the contrary, non-stationary noises have multiple non-stationary spectral peaks, so non-stationary noises need to be analyzed and detected multiple spectral peaks in detail. To overcome this problem, the proposed method detects all spectral peaks in non-stationary noise. It utilizes major spectral peaks for designing the masker signal. We carried out subjective and objective evaluation experiments with the Infant Cry added the masker signal to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method. Especially, in the objective evaluation experiment, we evaluated the degree of stress of subjects for Infant Cry. As a result, we confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed method.