Speech Separation by Humans and Machines

There is a serious problem in the recognition of sounds. It derives from the fact that they do not usually occur in isolation but in an environment in which a number of sound sources (voices, traffic, footsteps, music on the radio, and so on) are active at the same time. When these sounds arrive at the ear of the listener, the complex pressure waves coming from the separate sources add together to produce a single, more complex pressure wave that is the sum of the individual waves. The prob...