A Multi-Language Evaluation of the Rasti Method for Estimating Speech Intelligibility in Auditoria

摘要

The physical measure Rapid Speech Transmission Index (RASTI) was developed to assess speech intelligibility in auditoria. In order to evaluate this method, a set of 14 auditorium conditions (plus 2 replicas) with various degrees of reverberation and/or interfering noise were subjected to: (1) RASTI measurements; (2) articulation tests performed by laboratories in 11 different countries; and (3) additional quality rating experiment by 4 of these laboratories. The various listening experiments show substantial differences in the ranking of the 14 conditions. For instance, it appears that the absence of a carrier phrase in some of the articulation tests has great influence on the relative importance of reverberation as compared to noise interference. When considering only the tests which use an appropriate carrier phrase (7 countries), it is found that the RASTI values are in good agreement with the mean results of these articulation tests.