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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2020

?Turn an ear to hear?: the benefit of head orientation to speech intelligibility in complex acoustic environments

Résumé

Spatial release from masking is the speech-reception threshold improvement from the spatial separation of target speech and interferer(s). It has traditionally been studied with listeners facing the target talker, because such attitude had long been assumed to be most natural or required, either for optimal lip-reading performance or to benefit from the directionality of prostheses microphones. In the laboratory, with a single interferer in the rear hemifield, Grange & Culling (JASA 2016a,b) and Grange et al. (Trends in Hearing 2018) showed that a modest, 30ᴼ head orientation away from directly facing the target benefited normal-hearing listeners and cochlear implant users alike by as much as 4.5 dB. The lip-reading benefit was also unaffected by head orientation, such that both benefits are cumulative. Furthermore, because a directional-microphone sensitivity pattern is rotated 30-45ᴼ by the acoustic head-shadow, the head- orientation benefit (HOB) persisted with microphone directionality. Of special interest here is confirming the robustness of HOB in complex acoustic environments. To do so, an advanced simulation of a real restaurant was developed. Acquisition of binaural room impulse responses measured with a head and torso simulator moved across the restaurant enabled the simulation over headphones of a listener sat at one of 6 tables, attending to a talker sat across that table and either facing the talker or with a 30ᴼ head turn either side. Nine interferers were distributed across the restaurant. These could be either continuous target- speech-shaped noise or interfering voices. Studies employing normal-hearing listeners, mildly-moderately impaired listeners or simulated cochlear implant users revealed a 1-2 dB HOB at the best predicted 30ᴼ head orientation for all listeners, regardless of table position in the restaurant. This confirmed the robustness of HOB, even with the diffuse interference generated by the combination of spatially distributed interferers and reverberation typically found in social settings.
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Dates et versions

hal-03235941 , version 1 (26-05-2021)

Identifiants

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Jacques Grange, John Culling. ?Turn an ear to hear?: the benefit of head orientation to speech intelligibility in complex acoustic environments. e-Forum Acusticum 2020, Dec 2020, Lyon, France. pp.3485-3486, ⟨10.48465/fa.2020.0815⟩. ⟨hal-03235941⟩
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