Effects of small room reverberation on subjective preference

Abstract

In this talk I shall present some results on quantifying the effects of small room reverberation on diotic subjective preference of speech under conditions of no interfering noise. All reverberation was generated digitally using an image model of a rectangular room [Allen and Berkley, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 65, 943 (1979)]. Our main result is given by the equation P = Pmax − σT60, where P is the subjective preference in some arbitrary units, Pmax is the maximum possible preference, σ is the room spectral variance [Jetzt, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 65, 1204–1211 (1979)], and T60 is the reverberation time. The spectral variance is a known function of Δ/Δc, where Δ is the source‐receiver distance and Δc is the critical distance (Jetzt). In our experiment, σ went from 0.5 to 5.5, and T60 ranged between 75 and 500 ms. The above result will be explained in some detail.