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

Ward, L, Shirley, BG ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9634-4489 and Davies, WJ ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5835-7489 2017, Turning up the background noise; The effects of salient non-speech audio elements on dialogue intelligibility in complex acoustic scenes , in: Reproduced Sound, 15-17 November, Southampton, UK.

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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.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Schools:	Schools > School of Computing, Science and Engineering > Salford Innovation Research Centre
Journal or Publication Title:	Reproduced Sound 2016
Publisher:	Institute of Acoustics
Series Name:	Proceedings of the Institute of Acoustics
ISBN:	9781510834798
Depositing User:	W. J. Davies
Date Deposited:	10 Jul 2018 12:48
Last Modified:	15 Feb 2022 23:30
URI:	https://usir.salford.ac.uk/id/eprint/47754

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