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Effect of the inter-aural sound level differences on the speech intelligibility

2012; Acoustical Society of America; Volume: 131; Issue: 4_Supplement Linguagem: Inglês

10.1121/1.4708416

1520-9024

Chan Jae Park, Chan Hoon Haan,

Energy, Environment, Agriculture Analysis

It was defined from the results of many previous researches that the most effective criterion affecting sound clarity in rooms is the early reflected sound. C80 and D50 were used to evaluate sound clarity in rooms. These parameters are related with the sound energy in function of time and they are monoral indexes which do not count for the spatial information including sound directions. Thus, C80 and D50 do not consider the changes of sound clarity caused by difference of sound energy between left and right ears. The proposed study investigates the effect of the inter-aural sound level difference (ILD) on the speech intelligibility in classrooms which can be occurred by the absorption of interior surfaces. In order to do this, sound levels were measured with inter-aural differences of D50, C80 (ID-D50, ID-C80) using dummy-head binaural recording systems. As a result, it was clearly found that ILD was much increased beyond JND after sound absorptions were implied in room. Also, the correlation coefficient of ILD with the distance from sidewalls has increased from 0.696 to 0.890 after sound absorptions. However, there was not clear difference in other parameters (ID-D50, ID-C80). It is also denoted that the increase of ILD can affect the subjective speech intelligibility as well.