Improving speech communication in the age of face masks: A study on EMD denoising method by subjective speech comparison

•Implementation of the EMD Denoising Speech Enhancement method to enhance single-channel speech signals under various face mask conditions.•Effective utilization of the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) on the intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) to differentiate between noise and signal during the speech enhancement process.•Validation of the effectiveness of the EMD denoising speech enhancement method through comparison mean opinion scores (CMOS) with a panel of 30 listeners, providing subjective evaluations of the enhanced speech quality.