Perceptual factors of small room reverberation
Barbara McDermott, Jont B. Allen · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1976
Room reverberation has a well recognized characteristic quality which can be annoying in a conference telephony environment. The subjective factors of reverberent speech were studied by asking listeners to judge speech samples in which the short-term and long-term reverberation times the independent variables. Synthetic room impulse responses were generated on a digital computer based on an image model of a room. Four microphone-loudspeaker distances were combined with four wall adsorption coefficients, giving a total of 16 distinct room conditions. Speech samples consisting of ten sentences spoken by each of four talkers were reverberated by the 16 room conditions. All possible pairs of the 16 room conditions were presented to listeners for judgment. The subjects were asked to use a scale from zero to nine to report how different they thought the speech sounded in each pair of rooms. These data were analyzed by a scaling procedure that relates the difference judgments to a distance in a multidimensional perceptual space (INDSCAL). Our success in relating physically measured variables derived from the impulse responses to the factors of the perceptual space will be discussed.