Effects of interpersonal familiarity on the auditory distance perception of level-equalized reverberant speech

Özgen Demirkaplan,Hüseyin Hacıhabiboğlu

doi:10.1051/aacus/2020025

Özgen Demirkaplan, Hüseyin Hacıhabiboğlu

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1051/aacus/2020025

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Abstract

Familiarity with sound sources is known to have a modulatory effect on auditory distance perception. However, the level of familiarity that can affect distance perception is not clearly understood. A subjective experiment that aims to investigate the effects of interpersonal familiarity on auditory distance perception with level-equalized stimuli is reported. The experiment involves a binaural listening task where different source distances between 0.5 and 16 m were emulated by convolving dry speech signals with measured binaural room impulse responses. The experimental paradigm involved level-equalized stimuli comprising speech signals recorded from different-gender couples who have self-reported to have known each other for more than a year with daily interaction. Each subject judged the distances of a total of 15 different speech stimuli from their partner as well as spectrally most similar and most dissimilar strangers, for six different emulated distances. The main finding is that a similar but unfamiliar speaker is localized to be further away than a familiar speaker. Another finding is that the semantic properties of speech can potentially have a modulating effect on auditory distance judgements.

Highlights

The capability to localize sound sources in three dimensions provides distinct evolutionary advantages and is one of the two major ways alongside stereoscopic vision that humans can perceive space
Following methods used in previous auditory distance perception studies [1, 2, 6, 7, 36]; a compressive power function proposed by Zahorik [7] was fit to collected data
The main finding of the presented study is that interpersonal familiarity is a factor that can modulate the auditory perception of distance of reverberant speech

Summary

Introduction

The capability to localize sound sources in three dimensions provides distinct evolutionary advantages and is one of the two major ways alongside stereoscopic vision that humans can perceive space. Unlike directional localization which mainly depends on interaural and spectral cues, distance perception occurs as a result of the fusion and interplay of many different relative cues that have physical, perceptual and cognitive origins. While the effects of certain perceptual cues such as intensity, direct-to-reverberant energy (D/R) ratio, sound source spectrum, auditory parallax and vocal effort on auditory distance perception are relatively easy to quantify, they do not constitute the only relevant cues [2]. These cues can be summarized as follows

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