Vocal effort with changing talker-to-listener distance in different acoustic environments

Talkers adjust their vocal effort to communicate at different distances, aiming to compensate for the sound propagation losses. The present paper studies the influence of four acoustically different rooms on the speech produced by 13 male talkers addressing a listener at four distances. Talkers rais...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Journal of the Acoustical Society of America Vol. 129; no. 4; p. 1981
Main Authors Pelegrín-García, David, Smits, Bertrand, Brunskog, Jonas, Jeong, Cheol-Ho
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States 01.04.2011
Subjects
Acoustics
Adult
Communication
Environment Design
Feedback
Humans
Male
Models, Biological
Noise
Speech Acoustics
Speech Discrimination Tests
Speech Perception
Voice
Young Adult
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Summary:Talkers adjust their vocal effort to communicate at different distances, aiming to compensate for the sound propagation losses. The present paper studies the influence of four acoustically different rooms on the speech produced by 13 male talkers addressing a listener at four distances. Talkers raised their vocal intensity by between 1.3 and 2.2 dB per double distance to the listener and lowered it as a linear function of the quantity "room gain" at a rate of -3.6 dB/dB. There were also significant variations in the mean fundamental frequency, both across distance (3.8 Hz per double distance) and among environments (4.3 Hz), and in the long-term standard deviation of the fundamental frequency among rooms (4 Hz). In the most uncomfortable rooms to speak in, talkers prolonged the voiced segments of the speech they produced, either as a side-effect of increased vocal intensity or in order to compensate for a decrease in speech intelligibility.
ISSN:1520-8524
DOI:10.1121/1.3552881