Can externalizing dialogue when in the presence of stereo background noise improve speech intelligibility? This has been investigated for audio over headphones using head-tracking in order to explore potential future developments for small-screen devices. A quantitative listening experiment tasked participants with identifying target words in spoken sentences played in the presence of background noise via headphones. Sixteen different combinations of 3 independent variables were tested: speech and noise locations (internalized/externalized), video (on/off), and masking noise (stationary/fluctuating noise). The results revealed that the best improvements to speech intelligibility were generated by both the video-on condition and externalizing speech at the screen while retaining masking noise in the stereo mix.

Authors: Demonte, Philippa; Tang, Yan; Hughes, Richard J.; Cox, Trevor; Fazenda, Bruno; Shirley, Ben
Affiliation: University of Salford, Salford, Greater Manchester, UK
AES Convention: 144 (May 2018) Paper Number: 10011
Publication Date: May 14, 2018 Import into BibTeX
Subject: Perception – Part 3
Permalink: https://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=19407

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