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Development of an Audio-based Virtual Gaming Environment to Assist with Navigation Skills in the Blind

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Published on: March 27, 2013

Speech intelligibility in virtual restaurants.

John F Culling¹

¹School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Tower Building, Park Place, Cardiff, CF10 3AT, United Kingdom.

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

|October 31, 2016

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Increasing background noise significantly hinders speech understanding in simulated restaurants. More interfering sounds make it harder to hear a target voice, especially with complex acoustic scenes.

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Area of Science:

Auditory perception
Acoustic scene analysis
Speech intelligibility

Background:

Understanding speech in noisy environments is crucial for daily communication.
Restaurant acoustics present complex auditory challenges due to multiple sound sources and reverberation.
Perceptual unmasking of speech is affected by the number and type of interfering sounds.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the impact of multiple interfering sound sources on speech reception thresholds (SRTs) in simulated restaurant environments.
To examine how reverberation and simulation techniques influence speech intelligibility under masking.
To identify the point at which informational masking becomes significant with increasing interferers.

Main Methods:

Speech reception thresholds (SRTs) were measured for a target voice in virtual restaurant simulations.
The number of interfering sound sources varied from one to eight.
Simulations included different levels of reverberation and various simulation techniques.

Main Results:

SRTs increased sharply with the number of interferers, indicating reduced speech intelligibility.
Continuous noise was the most effective masker for a single interferer; single voices were least effective.
Informational masking effects were observed with two interferers, but converged across masker types with four or eight interferers.
In a real-room simulation, speech intelligibility degraded to a signal-to-noise ratio of approximately -5 dB with multiple interferers.

Conclusions:

The complexity of the acoustic scene, particularly the number of interfering sound sources, significantly degrades speech reception.
While masker type matters with few interferers, the number of sources becomes the dominant factor in complex auditory environments.
These findings have implications for designing acoustically optimized public spaces to improve speech intelligibility.