Turning up the background noise; The effects of salient non-speech audio elements on dialogue intelligibility in complex acoustic scenes

Ward, L; Shirley, BG; Davies, WJ

Abstract

As an acoustic scene becomes more complex listeners increasingly rely on complementary intelligibility cues, such as context and language structure, to understand speech. Despite the role salient non-speech audio elements, like sound effects, play in establishing context, approaches to make broadcast audio more intelligible have primarily assumed these elements should be suppressed, along with other background noise. This paper challenges that assumption and investigates the effect that ‘turning up’ some non-speech elements has on intelligibility. This is achieved using the Revised Speech Perception in Noise (R-SPIN) test, modified to include salient non-speech audio elements, carried out with normal hearing listeners. Results show a 77.62% increase in keyword recognition when salient non-speech elements are included. It is also shown that using both linguistic and acoustic context cues improves recognition by 111.55%, more than either cue used independently. Implications for clean audio strategies and future work are also discussed.

Citation

Ward, L., Shirley, B., & Davies, W. (2017, November). Turning up the background noise; The effects of salient non-speech audio elements on dialogue intelligibility in complex acoustic scenes. Presented at Reproduced Sound, Southampton, UK

• Presentation Conference Type: Other
• Conference Name: Reproduced Sound
• Conference Location: Southampton, UK
• Start Date: Nov 15, 2017
• End Date: Nov 17, 2017
• Publication Date: Mar 1, 2017
• Deposit Date: Jul 10, 2018
• Publisher: Institute of Acoustics
• Series Title: Proceedings of the Institute of Acoustics
• Series Number: 2
• Book Title: Reproduced Sound 2016
• ISBN: 9781510834798
• Publisher URL: http://reproducedsound.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/RS2016.pdf
• Additional Information: Event Type : Conference