Measurement of the speech intelligibility inside cars

摘要

The paper describes a measurement system developed for assessing the speech intelligibility inside carcompartments. This relates directly to the understandability of the voices being reproduced through the radioreceiving system (news, traffic info, etc.), but in the future it will be used also for assessing the direct speechcommunications between the passengers, and the performance of hands-free communication devices.The system is based on the use of two head and torso simulators, one equipped with an artificial mouth, thesecond equipped with binaural microphones. Only the second is used when the sound is being reproducedthrough the car’s sound system.The MLS-based version of the STI method is used for performing the measurements, taking into account theeffect of the background noise and the electro-acoustic propagation inside the compartment.