5pAA1. Calibration of consonant perception in room reverberation.
Session: Saturday Afternoon, Dec 02
Time: 1:00

Author: Kanako Ueno
Location: Inst. of Industrial Sci., Univ. of Tokyo, 4-6-1 Komaba,
Meguro-ku, Tokyo, 153-8505, Japan
Author: Norbert Kopco
Location: Boston Univ., 677 Beacon St., Boston, MA 02215
Author: Barbara Shinn-Cunningham
Location: Boston Univ., 677 Beacon St., Boston, MA 02215

Abstract:

Many studies of sound perception often assumed that our auditory
sensory processes are relatively static, rather than
plastic. However, in everyday environments, we naturally and
fluidly compensate for interfering effects of background noise and
room reverberation. In order to investigate how listeners calibrate
auditory perception to such acoustic interference, a listening
experiment was performed to measure the effect of sudden changes of
reverberation on the identification of consonants. Test sounds were
generated by convolving two types of binaural room impulse
responses (BRIRs) measured in large real rooms with speech
tokens. As a control condition, pseudo-anechoic BRIRs with
negligible reverberation energy were used. Listeners were asked to
identify the consonant in a vowel-consonant target. The target was
preceded by a carrier phrase consisting of vowel-consonant pairs
from the same talker. In some cases, the target and carrier phrase
were processed by the same BRIRs, while in others the BRIR's
processing target and carrier differed. Consistent effect of
calibration was observed in one of the simulated rooms, but not in
the other, suggesting that the ability to compensate for the
effects of reverberation depends on the specific pattern of
reverberation produced in a given room. [Work supported by AFOSR
and NSF.]