Can externalizing dialogue when in the presence of stereo background noise improve speech intelligibility? This has been investigated for audio over headphones using head-tracking in order to explore potential future developments for small-screen devices. A quantitative listening experiment tasked participants with identifying target words in spoken sentences played in the presence of background noise via headphones. Sixteen different combinations of 3 independent variables were tested: speech and noise locations (internalized/externalized), video (on/off), and masking noise (stationary/fluctuating noise). The results revealed that the best improvements to speech intelligibility were generated by both the video-on condition and externalizing speech at the screen while retaining masking noise in the stereo mix.

Authors: Demonte, Philippa; Tang, Yan; Hughes, Richard J.; Cox, Trevor; Fazenda, Bruno; Shirley, Ben
Affiliation: University of Salford, Salford, Greater Manchester, UK
AES Convention: 144 (May 2018) Paper Number: 10011
Publication Date: May 14, 2018
Subject: Perception – Part 3

Download Now (862 KB)

This paper is Open Access which means you can download it for free.

No AES members have commented on this paper yet.

Subscribe to this discussion

To be notified of new comments on this paper you can subscribe to this RSS feed. Forum users should login to see additional options.

Start a discussion!

If you would like to start a discussion about this paper and are an AES member then you can login here:
Username:
Password:

If you are not yet an AES member and have something important to say about this paper then we urge you to join the AES today and make your voice heard. You can join online today by clicking here.