Study of factors governing intelligibility in multi-speaker environments from an experiment with a large panel of listeners

摘要

The problem of intelligibility in multi-speaker environments is of great interest in differentdomains of application: the problem of audio communication in military operationsengages the safety of people involved in conflicts; regarding in occupational health andsafety, the issue of noise disturbance in open-plan offices due to conversations is also ofprime importance. Recently, a collaboration between the French-German ResearchInstitute of Saint-Louis (ISL) and the French Institute for Occupational Safety and Health(INRS) has led to a large experimental study consisting in evaluating the capabilities of 42subjects in repeating French sentences in different listening environments. Many factorswere changed during the experiment, such as the number, the location and the gender ofthe speakers, the mode of sound presentation (diotic, dichotic, virtual 3D on headphones,real 3D on loudspeakers), and the presence or the absence of noise. The statistical analysesperformed during this study provide significant results as they involved a large number oflisteners. For instance, it was demonstrated that at a constant signal to noise ratio, theinfluence of noise on intelligibility differs according to the mode of sound presentation andthat virtual 3D presentation has many advantages over headphones in preservingintelligibility in audio communications.