Intelligibility of speech under nonexponential decay conditions

Abstract

In this paper, subjective studies made on nonexponentially decaying sounds are described. The various decay conditions are realized by changing the position of the pickup microphone in a reverberation room with a highly absorbing sample on the floor. It is shown, by means of articulation tests, that intelligibility of speech is more close to a highly absorbing sample than away from it. It is also shown that the perception of decay is mainly due to the initial portion of a nonexponential decay. The significance of these studies is determining the acoustics of halls is explained. Subiect Classification: 55.20; 70.35; 55.30.

Acoustic Coupling Effects in St Paul's Cathedral, London

“…The sagging appearance of the experimental curves can also result from the lack of di!usion of the sound "eld [2,7,32]. However, in the case of St Paul's Cathedral the rich carving and ornamentation, as well as the relatively low absorption of the enclosure surfaces, contribute to the high di!usivity of the individual sound "elds in the subspaces.…”

Blind dereverberation of monaural speech signals based on harmonic structure

“…We used a 42-ms Hanning window with a 1-ms window shift when estimating F 0 and voicing status, and calculating the amplitude and phase values of the harmonic components used in Eq. (16). We set p = 61 in Eq.…”

Blind dereverberation of single channel speech signal based on harmonic structure

“…We examined the performance of the proposed dereverberation method in terms of reverberation curves [8] and quality of dereverberated sound. For this purpose, we used 5240 Japanese word utterances of a male and a female speakers (MAU and FKM, 12 kHz sampling) included in the ATR database as sound source signal, .…”

“…For the male speaker, the reverberation effect in the lower time region was also effectively reduced. This means that strong reverberant components were eliminated from the impulse response, and therefore, the intelligibility of the target speech was expected to improve [8]. Although the reverberation effect in the higher time region for the male speaker was increased when r-time is ¼ ½ or ¼ ¾ sec, the sound quality as a whole is expected to improve when r-time is 0.2 sec because the earlier reverberation that is much stronger than the later one was eliminated.…”

“…In this simple case, accuracy of direct sound estimation is rather high because there is no other sound occurring simultaneously when the direct sound occurs, and thus the estimated transfer function À ¼ ¼ is expected to be very close to À ¼ . Figure 2 shows the reverberation curves [8] …”