Speech intelligibility and localization in a multi-source environment

Abstract

Natural environments typically contain sound sources other than the source of interest that may interfere with the ability of listeners to extract information about the primary source. Studies of speech intelligibility and localization by normal-hearing listeners in the presence of competing speech are reported on in this work. One, two or three competing sentences [IEEE Trans. Audio Electroacoust. 17(3), 225-246 (1969)] were presented from various locations in the horizontal plane in several spatial configurations relative to a target sentence. Target and competing sentences were spoken by the same male talker and at the same level. All experiments were conducted both in an actual sound field and in a virtual sound field. In the virtual sound field, both binaural and monaural conditions were tested. In the speech intelligibility experiment, there were significant improvements in performance when the target and competing sentences were spatially separated. Performance was similar in the actual sound-field and virtual sound-field binaural listening conditions for speech intelligibility. Although most of these improvements are evident monaurally when using the better ear, binaural listening was necessary for large improvements in some situations. In the localization experiment, target source identification was measured in a seven-alternative absolute identification paradigm with the same competing sentence configurations as for the speech study. Performance in the localization experiment was significantly better in the actual sound-field than in the virtual sound-field binaural listening conditions. Under binaural conditions, localization performance was very good, even in the presence of three competing sentences. Under monaural conditions, performance was much worse. For the localization experiment, there was no significant effect of the number or configuration of the competing sentences tested. For these experiments, the performance in the speech intelligibility experiment was not limited by localization ability.

Aging and Speech-on-Speech Masking

“…In general, informational masking is most likely to occur when the target and masker are similar to one another (e.g., when both a speech target and a speech masker are recorded from talkers of the same sex). A number of studies have demonstrated that both energetic and, in particular, informational masking can be reduced by spatially separating the target from the masker (e.g., Brungart & Simpson, 2002;Freyman, Balakrishnan, & Helfer, 2004;Freyman, et al, 1999Freyman, et al, , 2001Freyman, Helfer, & Balakrishnan, 2005;Hawley, Litovsky, & Colburn, 1999) although the mechanisms leading to spatial separation advantage seem to differ between the two types of masking. Specifically, even when the head shadow and binaural interaction effects that lead to reductions in energetic masking are obscured by reflections, a spatial separation advantage still can be obtained when the competing sound produces informational masking (e.g., Brungart, Simpson, & Freyman, 2005;Freyman, et al, 1999;Kidd, Mason, Brughera, & Hartmann, 2005;Rakerd, Aaronson, & Hartmann, 2006).…”

Robust localisation of multiple speakers exploiting head movements and multi-conditional training of binaural cues

“…Human sound source localization performance is very robust, even in the presence of multiple competing sounds and room reverberation [1]. The two main cues that are used by the auditory system to determine the azimuth of a sound source are interaural time differences (ITDs) and interaural level differences (ILDs) [2].…”

Comparison between the Statistical cues in BSS techniques and Binaural cues in CASA approaches for reverberant speech separation

“…On the other hand, human auditory system with just two ears has shown great performance for source separation [5,4] which has been studied under the name of computation auditory scene analysis (CASA) [2,16]. It is found that different monaural and binaural cues such as pitch, interaural level difference (ILD) and interaural phase difference (IPD) can be estimated and exploited to generate corresponding T-F masks to identify the T-F units of the mixtures' spectrograms dominated by each source.…”