Archives of Acoustics, 48, 2, pp. 151–157, 2023
10.24425/aoa.2023.145229

Study on Chinese Speech Intelligibility Under Different Low-Frequency Characteristics of Reverberation Time Using a Hybrid Method

Wuqiong HUANG
South China University of Technology
China

Jianxin PENG
South China University of Technology
China

Tinghui XIE
Shijiazhuang Tiedao University
China

Reverberation time (RT) is an important indicator of room acoustics, however, most studies focus on the mid-high frequency RT, and less on the low-frequency RT. In this paper, a hybrid approach based on geometric and wave methods was proposed to build a more accurate and wide frequency-band room acoustic impulse response. This hybrid method utilized the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method modeling at low frequencies and the Odeon simulation at mid-high frequencies, which was investigated in a university classroom. The influence of the low-frequency RT on speech intelligibility was explored. For the low-frequency part, different impedance boundary conditions were employed and the effectiveness of the hybrid method has also been verified. From the results of objective acoustical parameters and subjective listening experiments, the smaller the low-frequency RT was, the higher the Chinese speech intelligibility score was. The syllables, consonants, vowels, and the syllable order also had significant effects on the intelligibility score.
Keywords: low frequency; speech intelligibility; classroom; finite-difference time-domain method
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Copyright © The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0).

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DOI: 10.24425/aoa.2023.145229