The recognition of room acoustics with different speech signals: An experiment with auralisations

Abstract

Previous studies have shown the ability of human listeners to recognize rooms, both with the same or different signals. However, most of them focus on the concert halls and orchestral music, which usually accompanies such spaces. This thesis focuses on the human ability to recognize acoustic conditions in a small rectangular room using speech signals. The method used to study is a listening experiment in which participants have to recognize the acoustics of the specific room configuration. Stimuli are speech signals, both female and male auralized for three different setups(three different acoustic panels configuration) of the room. The experiment consists of audiometry, which examines the hearing threshold of participants, discrimination test, where participants are presented with three samples of a different speaker, in which one of them is different from the other two in terms of room acoustics and a recognition test, where listeners are presented with the reference signal and three alternatives, with one correct match. The recognition test consists of two conditions. In the first condition, the reference and the alternatives contained the same source sound. In the second condition, the reference is a different speech signal than the alternatives. The experiment also included a questionnaire with questions about the undertaken experiment. Subsequently, search and decision-making performances were analyzed and interpreted. The overall results of the experiment showed that the task was relatively easy for all participants. However, they indicated that the recognition of acoustic conditions in rectangular room is harder while using different stimuli instead of just one signal.