Article
Evaluation of complex acoustic scenes for hearing research and audiology (vor Ort)
* Presenting author
Day / Time: 22.03.2022, 16:40-17:00
Room: 7-01.
Typ: Vortrag (strukturierte Sitzung)
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Abstract:
In hearing research, the term ecological validity is becoming increasingly important, referring to the degree to which research findings reflect real-life hearing-related function, activity, or participation. Given that every-day-life acoustic environments are typically complex and often involve enclosed reverberant spaces, faithful room acoustics simulation and rendering in the laboratory are important for ecological validity in hearing research and audiology. Here, we evaluate different approaches for generating synthetic room impulse responses (RIR) in comparison to RIR measurements in the real-life counterparts of simulated acoustic environments. For the evaluation, three very different, publicly available environments were chosen: A Metro station, a pub, and a living room [zenodo.org/communities/audiovisual_scenes]. Various RIRs for different source and receiver-positons were used. In a headphone-based comparison, we assessed speech intelligibility, plausibility and a comprehensive set of spatial quality features, including ratings regarding aspects of the reverberation and the sound source using a multiple-stimuli-with-hidden-reference-and-anchor (MUSHRA) like procedure. In a loudspeaker-array-based comparison localization was assessed, ensuring externalization. The aim is to conduct these evaluations not only locally, but across research sites providing important insight into the acoustic and psychoacoustic reproduction variance of each scene, enabling reproducible science in verified complex acoustic scenes for hearing research and audiology.