How reverberation degrades and aids source perception in auditory scenes.

Abstract

Reverberant energy (or reverberation) influences perception of source content (in addition to influencing perception of the environment and of source location). Moreover, reverberation can affect perception in different ways depending on whether a source is played in quiet or in a scene containing competing sounds. Reverberation smears spectro-temporal structure, which can interfere with estimation of duration, pitch contour, and other basic attributes. In the extreme, such spectro-temporal smearing (self-masking) can interfere with extracting the meaning of signals like speech or music. However, if the direct sound reaching a listener is nearly inaudible, reverberation adds energy, improving source detectability. While these in-quiet effects contribute to perception of sources in a complex acoustic scene, additional factors also come into play. For instance, if two otherwise similar sources have different levels of reverberation, the reverberation can make them more perceptually distinct, making it easier to focus attention on one and understand it. On the other hand, the same spectro-temporal smearing that can hurt perception of a source in quiet can also disrupt source segregation, making it difficult to selectively analyze a desired source. Examples of these different effects of reverberation on perception, taken from recent experiments, will be presented and discussed.