Related papers: Irrelevant speech effect in open plan offices: A l…
The irrelevant speech effect (ISE) characterizes detriment to cognitive task performance in the presence of irrelevant speech. This paper examines whether the ISE varies due to the number of simultaneously active nearby talkers (for up to…
The irrelevant sound effect (ISE) characterizes short-term memory performance impairment during irrelevant sounds relative to quiet. Irrelevant sound presentation in most laboratory-based ISE studies has been rather limited to represent…
Open-plan offices (OPOs) have been around for more than half a century now, chronicling the vicissitudes of workplace topography amongst other factors. This paper addresses one such factor - the sound environment in occupied OPOs in…
Within the soundscapes of open-plan offices, irrelevant speech has consistently been reported as the most distracting, and causing performance decrements for workers. Notwithstanding this generalization, the 'babble' created by multiple…
Open-plan offices are well-known to be adversely affected by acoustic issues. This study aims to model acoustic dissatisfaction using measurements of room acoustics, sound environment during occupancy, and occupant surveys (n = 349) in 28…
The paper proposes an efficient, robust, and reconfigurable technique to suppress various types of noises for any sampling rate. The theoretical analyses, subjective and objective test results show that the proposed noise suppression (NS)…
Large audio-language models (LALMs) unify speech and text processing, but their robustness in noisy real-world settings remains underexplored. We investigate how irrelevant audio, such as silence, synthetic noise, and environmental sounds,…
The speech transmission index (STI) and room acoustic parameters (RAPs), which are derived from a room impulse response (RIR), such as reverberation time and early decay time, are essential to assess speech transmission and to predict the…
Machine learning models for speech-based depression classification offer promise for health care applications. Despite growing work on depression classification, little is understood about how the length of speech-input impacts model…
This paper examines the implications of using the Scale-Invariant Signal-to-Distortion Ratio (SI-SDR) as both evaluation and training objective in supervised speech separation, when the training references contain noise, as is the case with…
Adding noise to a sensory signal generally decreases human performance. However noise can improve performance too, due to a process called stochastic resonance (SR). This paradoxical effect may be exploited in psychophysical experiments, to…
This paper develops a model that allows to analyze the physical parameters that determine the degree of environmental comfort of employees in offices. Parameters such as air quality, noise, thermal environment, and lighting are considered.…
The acoustic environment can degrade speech quality during communication (e.g., video call, remote presentation, outside voice recording), and its impact is often unknown. Objective metrics for speech quality have proven challenging to…
Age-related hearing loss (HL) reduces speech intelligibility (SI) in older adults (OAs). However, deficits in central and cognitive processing also substantially impact SI. Understanding these contributions is essential for explaining…
Instrumental intelligibility metrics are commonly used as an alternative to listening tests. This paper evaluates 12 monaural intrusive intelligibility metrics: SII, HEGP, CSII, HASPI, NCM, QSTI, STOI, ESTOI, MIKNN, SIMI, SIIB, and…
In noisy environments, speech can be hard to understand for humans. Spoken dialog systems can help to enhance the intelligibility of their output, either by modifying the speech synthesis (e.g., imitate Lombard speech) or by optimizing the…
The scaling of Large Language Models (LLMs) has exposed a critical gap between their performance on static benchmarks and their fragility in dynamic, information-rich environments. While models excel at isolated tasks, the computational…
The effect of hearing impairment on speech perception was described by Plomp (1978) as a sum of a loss of class A, due to signal attenuation, and a loss of class D, due to signal distortion. While a loss of class A can be compensated by…
In the present study, speech intelligibility (SI) experiments were performed using simulated hearing loss (HL) sounds in laboratory and remote environments to clarify the effects of peripheral dysfunction. Noisy speech sounds were processed…
The calculation of most objective speech intelligibility assessment metrics requires clean speech as a reference. Such a requirement may limit the applicability of these metrics in real-world scenarios. To overcome this limitation, we…