Severe audio degradation flips the measured variable from annoyance to word accuracy
Evidence
Psychoacoustic experiments may be used to define thresholds of perception and rating scales for small degradations, such as the quality of the sound. However, at the other end of the quality scale is the case in which the degradation, due to noise distortion, reverberation and so on is so severe that it affects the intelligibility of speech. This is also measured and defined by the results of psychoacoustic experiments, but in these circumstances, instead of annoyance, the dependent variable is the proportion of the words that are actually heard correctly. — David M. Howard, Jamie Angus, Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, 2397
Related
- Speech needs at least 7.5 dB signal-to-noise ratio for adequate intelligibility (similarity 0.82)
- Very high speech levels can reduce word recognition scores. (similarity 0.82)
- Equal SNR reductions hurt words and sentences alike in noise. (similarity 0.81)
- Linguistic context lets listeners understand speech at lower acoustic intelligibility (similarity 0.81)
- Volume compression worsens speech intelligibility by flattening syllabic amplitude cues (similarity 0.81)
- Both auditory and cognitive factors determine intelligibility in noise (similarity 0.80)
- Auditory-model difference measures predict audible quality degradation (similarity 0.80)
- Turning down cinema volume to reduce loudness harms dialog intelligibility. (similarity 0.80)
- Intelligibility is measured by proportion of words heard correctly, not by perceived quality (similarity 0.80)
- Noise-vocoding degrades speech by replacing detail with band-limited noise envelopes. (similarity 0.80)
- Improved intelligibility produces measurable cortical differences beyond mere acoustic responses (similarity 0.80)
- Nonsense-syllable tests measure intelligibility by stripping away language-level prediction (similarity 0.79)
- Percentage of lost consonants maps directly to intelligibility quality thresholds (similarity 0.79)
- Speech reception thresholds plateau beyond a target low-pass attenuation floor (similarity 0.79)
- Acoustic increments are more salient than decrements in complex stimuli (similarity 0.79)