Abstract
As well as background noise and reverberation, speaker-to-listener relative location affects the binaural speech transmission index (BSTI) considerably, especially in the near field. To highlight how speaker location influences the BSTI, binaural room impulse responses measured in a low-reverberation listening room are used to obtain the BSTI indirectly and analyze its near-field dependence on distance and direction. The results show that the BSTI based on the better-ear rule is higher when the virtual speaker is located laterally rather than in the anterior or posterior. When the distance-dependent intensity factor is introduced, the distance is the dominant factor, not the azimuth.
Highlights
Speech intelligibility (SI) is an important metric for predicting the loss of speech information transmitted between speakers and listeners in a room
Some studies have investigated how binaural SI (BSI) is influenced by speaker direction and distance relative to the listener in the far field (FF),9–11 where the speaker is usually located outside the reverberation radius and the room acoustic conditions are more important to BSI than is the binaural effect (BE)
Taking r 1⁄4 1.0 m as an example, the binaural RIRs (BRIRs) spectral amplitude at 6–9 kHz is relatively low around the azimuth of 60, which is related to auricular reflection
Summary
Speech intelligibility (SI) is an important metric for predicting the loss of speech information transmitted between speakers and listeners in a room. SI is an objective physical quantity influenced by (i) the room acoustic conditions, including background noise [or signal-tonoise ratio (SNR)] and reverberation; (ii) the target speaker’s characteristics, such as directivity and frequency response; and (iii) the binaural effect (BE), such as head shadows (HSs) and binaural interactions.. Some studies have investigated how BSI is influenced by speaker direction and distance relative to the listener in the far field (FF), where the speaker is usually located outside the reverberation radius and the room acoustic conditions are more important to BSI than is the BE. If the speaker is located in the near field (NF) [i.e., at a distance of no more than 1.0 m, referring to the definition of the NF head-related transfer function (HRTF)] or the listener is within the reverberation radius, the detrimental effect of reverberation on BSI is attenuated.. The HS effect arises regarding the NF HRTF.
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