Adding air absorption to simulated room acoustic models.

Room acoustics models are often used in auditory research. The simplest implementations of these models ignore air absorption, and this lack can affect the room response, especially at high frequencies and for large simulated spaces. This letter proposes a method for adding air absorption to a simulated room impulse response calculated without air absorption. The procedure creates a time-varying lowpass filter that approximates air absorption as a function of distance. The existing absorption-free room response is passed through the filter to create a new response that incorporates air absorption effects.

Speech intelligibility in rooms: Disrupting the effect of prior listening exposure.

It has been demonstrated that prior listening exposure to reverberant environments can improve speech understanding in that environment. Previous studies have shown that the buildup of this effect is brief (less than 1 s) and seems largely to be elicited by exposure to the temporal modulation characteristics of the room environment. Situations that might be expected to cause a disruption in this process have yet to be demonstrated. This study seeks to address this issue by showing what types of changes in the acoustic environment cause a breakdown of the room exposure phenomenon. Using speech carrier phrases featuring sudden changes in the acoustic environment, breakdown in the room exposure effect was observed when there was change in the late reverberation characteristics of the room that signaled a different room environment. Changes in patterns of early reflections within the same room environment did not elicit breakdown. Because the environmental situations that resulted in breakdown also resulted in substantial changes to the broadband temporal modulation characteristic of the signal reaching the ears, results from this study provide additional support for the hypothesis that the room exposure phenomenon is linked to the temporal modulation characteristics of the environment.

Speech intelligibility in rooms: Effect of prior listening exposure interacts with room acoustics.

There is now converging evidence that a brief period of prior listening exposure to a reverberant room can influence speech understanding in that environment. Although the effect appears to depend critically on the amplitude modulation characteristic of the speech signal reaching the ear, the extent to which the effect may be influenced by room acoustics has not been thoroughly evaluated. This study seeks to fill this gap in knowledge by testing the effect of prior listening exposure or listening context on speech understanding in five different simulated sound fields, ranging from anechoic space to a room with broadband reverberation time (T60) of approximately 3 s. Although substantial individual variability in the effect was observed and quantified, the context effect was, on average, strongly room dependent. At threshold, the effect was minimal in anechoic space, increased to a maximum of 3 dB on average in moderate reverberation (T60 = 1 s), and returned to minimal levels again in high reverberation. This interaction suggests that the functional effects of prior listening exposure may be limited to sound fields with moderate reverberation (0.4 ≤ T60 ≤ 1 s).

Retroactive Streaming Fails to Improve Concurrent Vowel Identification.

The sequential organization of sound over time can interact with the concurrent organization of sounds across frequency. Previous studies using simple acoustic stimuli have suggested that sequential streaming cues can retroactively affect the perceptual organization of sounds that have already occurred. It is unknown whether such effects generalize to the perception of speech sounds. Listeners' ability to identify two simultaneously presented vowels was measured in the following conditions: no context, a preceding context stream (precursors), and a following context stream (postcursors). The context stream was comprised of brief repetitions of one of the two vowels, and the primary measure of performance was listeners' ability to identify the other vowel. Results in the precursor condition showed a significant advantage for the identification of the second vowel compared to the no-context condition, suggesting that sequential grouping mechanisms aided the segregation of the concurrent vowels, in agreement with previous work. However, performance in the postcursor condition was significantly worse compared to the no-context condition, providing no evidence for an effect of stream segregation, and suggesting a possible interference effect. Two additional experiments involving inharmonic (jittered) vowels were performed to provide additional cues to aid retroactive stream segregation; however, neither manipulation enabled listeners to improve their identification of the target vowel. Taken together with earlier studies, the results suggest that retroactive streaming may require large spectral differences between concurrent sources and thus may not provide a robust segregation cue for natural broadband sounds such as speech.

Time course of a perceptual enhancement effect for noise-masked speech in reverberant environments.

Speech intelligibility has been shown to improve with prior exposure to a reverberant room environment [Brandewie and Zahorik (2010). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 128, 291-299] with a spatially separated noise masker. Here, this speech enhancement effect was examined in multiple room environments using carrier phrases of varying lengths in order to control the amount of exposure. Speech intelligibility enhancement of between 5% and 18% was observed with as little as 850 ms of exposure, although the effect's time course varied considerably with reverberation and signal-to-noise ratio. In agreement with previous work, greater speech enhancement was found for reverberant environments compared to anechoic space.

Amplitude modulation detection by human listeners in reverberant sound fields: Carrier bandwidth effects and binaural versus monaural comparison.

Previous work [Zahorik et al., POMA, 12, 050005 (2011)] has reported that for a broadband noise carrier signal in a simulated reverberant sound field, human sensitivity to amplitude modulation (AM) is higher than would be predicted based on the broadband acoustical modulation transfer function (MTF) of the listening environment. Interpretation of this result was complicated by the fact that acoustical MTFs of rooms are often quite different for different carrier frequency regions, and listeners may have selectively responded to advantageous carrier frequency regions where the effective acoustic modulation loss due to the room was less than indicated by a broadband acoustic MTF analysis. Here, AM sensitivity testing and acoustic MTF analyses were expanded to include narrowband noise carriers (1-octave and 1/3-octave bands centered at 4 kHz), as well as monaural and binaural listening conditions. Narrowband results were found to be consistent with broadband results: In a reverberant sound field, human AM sensitivity is higher than indicated by the acoustical MTFs. The effect was greatest for modulation frequencies above 32 Hz and was present whether the stimulation was monaural or binaural. These results are suggestive of mechanisms that functionally enhance modulation in reverberant listening.

Adaptation to Room Acoustics Using the Modified Rhyme Test.

The negative effect of reverberant sound energy on speech intelligibility is well documented. Recently, however, prior exposure to room acoustics has been shown to increase intelligibility for a number of listeners in simulated room environments. This room adaptation effect, a possible extension of dynamic echo suppression, has been shown to be specific to reverberant rooms and requires binaural input. Because this effect has been demonstrated only using the Coordinated Response Measure (CRM) corpus it is important to determine whether the increase in intelligibility scores reported previously was due to the specific nature of the CRM task. Here we demonstrate a comparable room-acoustic effect using the Modified Rhyme Test (MRT) corpus in multiple room environments. The results are consistent with the idea that the room adaptation effect may be a natural phenomenon of listening in reverberant environments.

Perceptual Adaptation to Room Acoustics and Effects on Speech Intelligibility in Hearing-Impaired Populations.

Recent evidence suggests that brief listening exposure to a reverberant room environment can improve closed-set speech intelligibility in that same environment. For normal-hearing populations, this room adaptation effect can result in improvements in intelligibility of as much as 20%, but depends strongly on the reverberation time of the room, and appears to require binaural input. Because poor speech intelligibility in reverberation is a common complaint for hearing-impaired listeners, it is important to determine how room adaptation might impact speech intelligibility for hearing-impaired populations. Here, room adaptation was quantified for a sample of listeners with sensorineural hearing loss that varied in severity and configuration. Speech reception thresholds (SRTs) were measured both with and without prior listening exposure to the room environment. Headphone-based auralization techniques were used to simulate the acoustics of various listening rooms, ranging from anechoic to highly reverberant space (broadband T60 = 3 s). Although SRTs both with and without prior room exposure were found to be generally elevated relative to normal-hearing listeners, the room adaptation effect, as defined by the relative decrease in SRT with room exposure, was comparable on average to that observed for normal-hearing listeners. This result is consistent with the view that room adaptation effects result from central auditory processing mechanisms.

Amplitude modulation detection by human listeners in sound fields.

The temporal modulation transfer function (TMTF) approach allows techniques from linear systems analysis to be used to predict how the auditory system will respond to arbitrary patterns of amplitude modulation (AM). Although this approach forms the basis for a standard method of predicting speech intelligibility based on estimates of the acoustical modulation transfer function (MTF) between source and receiver, human sensitivity to AM as characterized by the TMTF has not been extensively studied under realistic listening conditions, such as in reverberant sound fields. Here, TMTFs (octave bands from 2 - 512 Hz) were obtained in 3 listening conditions simulated using virtual auditory space techniques: diotic, anechoic sound field, reverberant room sound field. TMTFs were then related to acoustical MTFs estimated using two different methods in each of the listening conditions. Both diotic and anechoic data were found to be in good agreement with classic results, but AM thresholds in the reverberant room were lower than predictions based on acoustical MTFs. This result suggests that simple linear systems techniques may not be appropriate for predicting TMTFs from acoustical MTFs in reverberant sound fields, and may be suggestive of mechanisms that functionally enhance modulation during reverberant listening.

Prior listening in rooms improves speech intelligibility.

Although results from previous studies have demonstrated that the acoustic effects of a single reflection are perceptually suppressed after repeated exposure to a particular configuration of source and reflection, the extent to which this dynamic echo suppression might generalize to speech understanding in room environments with multiple reflections and reverberation is largely unknown. Here speech intelligibility was measured using the coordinate response measure corpus both with and without prior listening exposure to a reverberant room environment, which was simulated using virtual auditory space techniques. Prior room listening exposure was manipulated by presenting either a two-sentence carrier phrase that preceded the target speech, or no carrier phrase within the room environment. Results from 14 listeners indicate that with prior room exposure, masked speech reception thresholds were on average 2.7 dB lower than thresholds without exposure, an improvement in intelligibility of over 18 percentage points on average. This effect, which is shown to be absent in anechoic space and greatly reduced under monaural listening conditions, demonstrates that prior binaural exposure to reverberant rooms can improve speech intelligibility, perhaps due to a process of perceptual adaptation to the acoustics of the listening room.

Time-forward speech intelligibility in time-reversed rooms.

The effects of time-reversed room acoustics on word recognition abilities were examined using virtual auditory space techniques, which allowed for temporal manipulation of the room acoustics independent of the speech source signals. Two acoustical conditions were tested: one in which room acoustics were simulated in a realistic time-forward fashion and one in which the room acoustics were reversed in time, causing reverberation and acoustic reflections to precede the direct-path energy. Significant decreases in speech intelligibility--from 89% on average to less than 25%--were observed between the time-forward and time-reversed rooms. This result is not predictable using standard methods for estimating speech intelligibility based on the modulation transfer function of the room. It may instead be due to increased degradation of onset information in the speech signals when room acoustics are time-reversed.