One way of enhancing speech in an additive acoustic noise environment is to perform a spectral decomposition of a frame of noisy speech and to attenuate a particular spectral line depending on how much the measured speech plus noise power exceeds an estimate of the background noise. Using a two state model for the speech event (speech absent or speech present) and determining the maximum likelihood estimator of the speech power results in a new class of suppression curves which permits a tradeoff of noise suppression against speech distortion. The algorithm has been implemented in real time in the time domain, exploiting the structure of the channel vocoder. Extensive testing has shown that the noise can be made imperceptible by proper choice of the suppression factor. (Author)