Quality aspects of music used as a background noise in speech communication over mobile network

This paper compares the effect of send-side music and environmental noise as background noise in a telephone communication. The study focuses on the quality experienced by the end user in the context of NB, WB and SWB mobile speech communication. The subjective test procedure defined in ITU-T Rec. P.835 is followed in this study. The results show that music as background noise in telephone conversation deteriorates the overall quality experienced by the end user. Moreover, the impact of music background noise on the quality is similar to that of the environmental noise. Furthermore it is shown that the music background noise seems to be slightly less intrusive than the environmental noise, especially when it comes to the lower SNR.