Effects of binaural rendering personalisation and reverberation on speech-on-speech masking

Daugintis R, Alary B, Geronazzo M, Picinali L. Effects of binaural rendering personalisation and reverberation on speech-on-speech masking. In: AES 2024 International Conference on Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality. Audio Engineering Society; 2024. Paper 22. Available from: https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=22671

@inproceedings{Daugintis2024_22671,
  author = {Daugintis, Rapolas and Alary, Benoît and Geronazzo, Michele and Picinali, Lorenzo},
  title = {{Effects of binaural rendering personalisation and reverberation on speech-on-speech masking}},
  booktitle = {AES 2024 International Conference on Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality},
  note = {Paper 22},
  year = {2024},
  month = aug,
  publisher = {Audio Engineering Society},
  url = {https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=22671}
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - Effects of binaural rendering personalisation and reverberation on speech-on-speech masking
AU  - Daugintis, Rapolas
AU  - Alary, Benoît
AU  - Geronazzo, Michele
AU  - Picinali, Lorenzo
T2  - AES 2024 International Conference on Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality
M1  - Paper 22
PY  - 2024
DA  - 2024/08/05
UR  - https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=22671
PB  - Audio Engineering Society
LA  - en
AB  - This study investigates the effect of head-related transfer function (HRTF) personalisation on understanding binaurally rendered target speech masked by interfering speakers in reverberant conditions. During a listening test, participants had to identify a correct colour-number combination from a virtual talker rendered in front of them while ignoring two interfering talkers positioned either in front or at the back. The sound was rendered with either an individual HRTF or one of two non-individual ones. These were selected for each participant as the best or the worstmatching from the same HRTF dataset, based on predictions of a computational auditory model for sound localisation. Two types of reverb from measured spatial room impulse responses (SRIRs) were applied to the speech: realistic dichotic reverberation decoded from 4th-order Ambisonic SRIRs or diotic reverb based on the omnidirectional Ambisonic channel IR as a baseline. Preliminary results show that realistic dichotic reverb improves speech perception when interfering speech is co-located with the target. No significant differences were observed across HRTF conditions on a group level, but individual HRTF-related performance differences exist, requiring further intra-subject analyses and data collection to characterise the individual results.
ER  -