A lecturer's voice quality and its effect on memory, listening effort, and perception in a VR environment.

Many lecturers develop voice problems, such as hoarseness. Nevertheless, research on how voice quality influences listeners' perception, comprehension, and retention of spoken language is limited to a small number of audio-only experiments. We aimed to address this gap by using audio-visual virtual reality (VR) to investigate the impact of a lecturer's hoarseness on university students' heard text recall, listening effort, and listening impression. Fifty participants were immersed in a virtual seminar room, where they engaged in a Dual-Task Paradigm. They listened to narratives presented by a virtual female professor, who spoke in either a typical or hoarse voice. Simultaneously, participants performed a secondary task. Results revealed significantly prolonged secondary-task response times with the hoarse voice compared to the typical voice, indicating increased listening effort. Subjectively, participants rated the hoarse voice as more annoying, effortful to listen to, and impeding for their cognitive performance. No effect of voice quality was found on heard text recall, suggesting that, while hoarseness may compromise certain aspects of spoken language processing, this might not necessarily result in reduced information retention. In summary, our findings underscore the importance of promoting vocal health among lecturers, which may contribute to enhanced listening conditions in learning spaces.

The impact of a speaker's voice quality on auditory perception and cognition: a behavioral and subjective approach.

Introduction: Our voice is key for conveying information and knowledge to others during verbal communication. However, those who heavily depend on their voice, such as teachers and university professors, often develop voice problems, signaled by hoarseness. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of hoarseness on listeners' memory for auditory-verbal information, listening effort, and listening impression. Methods: Forty-eight normally hearing adults performed two memory tasks that were auditorily presented in varied voice quality (typical vs. hoarse). The tasks were Heard Text Recall, as part of a dual-task paradigm, and auditory Verbal Serial Recall (aVSR). Participants also completed a listening impression questionnaire for both voice qualities. Behavioral measures of memory for auditory-verbal information and listening effort were performance and response time. Subjective measures of listening effort and other aspects of listening impression were questionnaire rating scores. Results: Results showed that, except for the aVSR, behavioral outcomes did not vary with the speaker's voice quality. Regarding the aVSR, we found a significant interaction between voice quality and trial, indicating that participants' recall performance dropped in the beginning of the task in the hoarse-voice condition but not in the typical-voice condition, and then increased again toward the end. Results from the listening impression questionnaire showed that listening to the hoarse voice resulted in significantly increased perceived listening effort, greater annoyance and poorer self-reported performance. Discussion: These findings suggest that hoarseness can, at least subjectively, compromise effective listening. Vocal health may be particularly important in the educational context, where listening and learning are closely linked.

The ACOUCOU platform: Online acoustic education developed by an interdisciplinary team.

The ACOUCOU platform is a web-based, interactive, acoustics training platform that includes a set of free educational materials in various technical fields of acoustics. Educational materials are designed to serve as a modern self-development tool for students and engineers, as well as a comprehensive solution for professional education in the work environment. On the other hand, the provided materials of the platform can be a useful tool, supporting teachers, company researchers, and academic lecturers in the process of teaching acoustics. The ACOUCOU platform is a part of a strategic plan for expanding and strengthening acoustic knowledge web-based tools and supporting the development of innovative teaching methods based on attractive and effective delivery of digital content, and best practices at national and international levels. It addresses the challenge of a lack of experts in the acoustics field and the growing needs of the market.

The role of spatial separation of two talkers' auditory stimuli in the listener's memory of running speech: listening effort in a non-noisy conversational setting.

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the role of the spatial position of conversing talkers, that is, spatially separated or co-located, in the listener's short-term memory of running speech and listening effort. DESIGN: In two experiments (between-subject), participants underwent a dual-task paradigm, including a listening (primary) task wherein male and female talkers spoke coherent texts. Talkers were either spatially separated or co-located (within-subject). As a secondary task, visually presented tasks were used. Experiment I involved a number-judgement task, and Experiment II entailed switching between number and letter-judgement task. STUDY SAMPLE: Twenty-four young adults who reported normal hearing and normal or corrected to normal vision participated in each experiment. They were all students from the RWTH Aachen University. RESULTS: In both experiments, similar short-term memory performance of running speech was found independently of talkers being spatially separated or co-located. Performance in the secondary tasks, however, differed between these two talkers' auditory stimuli conditions, indicating that spatially separated talkers imposed reduced listening effort compared to their co-location. CONCLUSION: The findings indicated that auditory-perceptive information, such as the spatial position of talkers, plays a role in higher-level auditory cognition, that is, short-term memory of running speech, even when listening in quiet.

Spatial Release From Masking Under Different Reverberant Conditions in Young and Elderly Subjects: Effect of Moving or Stationary Maskers at Circular and Radial Conditions.

Purpose Normal-hearing and hard-of-hearing listeners suffer from reduced speech intelligibility in noisy and reverberant environments. Although daily listening environments are in constant motion, most researchers have only studied speech-in-noise perception for stationary masker locations. The aim of this study was to investigate the spatial release from masking (SRM) of circularly and radially moving maskers under different room acoustic conditions for young and elderly subjects. Method Twelve young subjects with normal hearing and 12 elderly subjects with normal hearing or mild hearing loss were tested. Several different room acoustic conditions were simulated and reproduced via headphones using binaural synthesis. The target speech stream consisted of German digit triplets, and masker stream consisted of quasistationary noise with matched long-term averaged speech spectra. During the experiment, the position of the masker was changed to be in different stationary positions, or varied continuously. In the latter case, it was moved either on a circular trajectory spanning a 90° azimuth angle or on a radial trajectory linearly increasing the distance to the receiver from 0.5 m to 1.8 m. Absorption characteristics of the virtual room's surfaces were changed, recreating an anechoic room, a treated room with mean reverberation times (RT60) = 0.48 s, and an untreated room with mean RT60 = 1.26 s. Results For the circular condition, a significant difference was found between moving and stationary maskers, F(4, 44) = 20.91, p < .001, with a bigger SRM for stationary maskers than moving masker conditions. Also, both age groups displayed a significant decrease in SRM over the reverberation conditions: F(2, 22) = 12.24, p < .001. For the radial condition, both age groups showed a significant decrease in SRM over the reverberation conditions, F(2, 22) = 13.62, p < .001, as well as the moving and stationary masker conditions, F(8, 88) = 29.23, p < .001. In general, the SRM of a moving masker decreased when the reverberation increased, especially for elderly subjects. Conclusions A radially moving masker led to improved SRM in an anechoic environment for both age groups, whereas a circularly moving masker caused degraded SRM, especially for elderly subjects in the highly reverberant environment. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.9795371.

A round robin on room acoustical simulation and auralization.

A round robin was conducted to evaluate the state of the art of room acoustic modeling software both in the physical and perceptual realms. The test was based on six acoustic scenes highlighting specific acoustic phenomena and for three complex, "real-world" spatial environments. The results demonstrate that most present simulation algorithms generate obvious model errors once the assumptions of geometrical acoustics are no longer met. As a consequence, they are neither able to provide a reliable pattern of early reflections nor do they provide a reliable prediction of room acoustic parameters outside a medium frequency range. In the perceptual domain, the algorithms under test could generate mostly plausible but not authentic auralizations, i.e., the difference between simulated and measured impulse responses of the same scene was always clearly audible. Most relevant for this perceptual difference are deviations in tone color and source position between measurement and simulation, which to a large extent can be traced back to the simplified use of random incidence absorption and scattering coefficients and shortcomings in the simulation of early reflections due to the missing or insufficient modeling of diffraction.

An Extended Binaural Real-Time Auralization System With an Interface to Research Hearing Aids for Experiments on Subjects With Hearing Loss.

Theory and implementation of acoustic virtual reality have matured and become a powerful tool for the simulation of entirely controllable virtual acoustic environments. Such virtual acoustic environments are relevant for various types of auditory experiments on subjects with normal hearing, facilitating flexible virtual scene generation and manipulation. When it comes to expanding the investigation group to subjects with hearing loss, choosing a reproduction system which offers a proper integration of hearing aids into the virtual acoustic scene is crucial. Current loudspeaker-based spatial audio reproduction systems rely on different techniques to synthesize a surrounding sound field, providing various possibilities for adaptation and extension to allow applications in the field of hearing aid-related research. Representing one option, the concept and implementation of an extended binaural real-time auralization system is presented here. This system is capable of generating complex virtual acoustic environments, including room acoustic simulations, which are reproduced as combined via loudspeakers and research hearing aids. An objective evaluation covers the investigation of different system components, a simulation benchmark analysis for assessing the processing performance, and end-to-end latency measurements.