SHOULD THE MATRIX BE RELOADED?
Glenn Leembruggen, A. Jim Stacey · 2023
Recently, one of the authors was engaged to refine the equalisation of the speech sound system in the Senate at the Australian Parliament House.The author used a significant amount of vocal music for this work, with the goal of being able to understand the words of the song.As vocal music contains masking noise in the form of musical accompaniment, it is often much harder to achieve intelligibility than with spoken words.One particular artist who was difficult to understand was Tom Waits, a singer with a big, deep, poorly-articulated voice.Small changes in frequency response of no more than 1 dB in a few 1/3 octave bands, allowed us to understand the words to a much greater extent, without damaging the tonality of the music.The improvements gained by equalising with Tom Waits were also worthwhile with other artists, but were more audible with Waits.