Speech quality is one of the main foci of speech-related research, where it is frequently studied with speech intelligibility, another essential measurement. Band-level perceptual speech intelligibility, however, has been studied frequently, whereas speech quality has not been thoroughly analyzed. In this paper, a Multiple Stimuli With Hidden Reference and Anchor (MUSHRA) inspired approach was proposed to study the individual robustness of frequency bands to noise with perceptual speech quality as the measure. Speech signals were filtered into thirty-two frequency bands with compromising real-world noise employed at different signal-to-noise ratios. Robustness to noise indices of individual frequency bands was calculated based on the human-rated perceptual quality scores assigned to the reconstructed noisy speech signals. Trends in the results suggest the mid-frequency region appeared less robust to noise in terms of perceptual speech quality. These findings suggest future research aiming at improving speech quality should pay more attention to the mid-frequency region of the speech signals accordingly.

翻译：语音质量是语音相关研究的主要焦点之一，常与另一关键指标——语音可懂度共同探讨。然而，频带层面的感知语音可懂度已得到广泛研究，而语音质量尚未被深入分析。本文提出一种受隐藏参考与锚点多刺激（MUSHRA）方法启发的方案，以感知语音质量为度量，研究各频带对噪声的独立鲁棒性。语音信号被滤波为三十二个频带，并在不同信噪比下引入模拟真实场景的噪声。基于人工评定的感知质量分数（针对重建的含噪语音信号），计算了各频带的噪声鲁棒性指数。结果趋势表明，在感知语音质量方面，中频区域对噪声的鲁棒性较低。这些发现提示，未来旨在提升语音质量的研究应相应更关注语音信号的中频区域。