USING A u RALIZATION

Speech intelligibility is known to be mainly determined by the signal-to-noise level difference at a listener, and reverberation. It is directly related to signal-to-noise level difference and is inversely related to the reverberation time. However, their interaction results in a complicated situation in real rooms. Increased reverberation benefits speech intelligibility by increasing speech levels. Noise is also affected by the reverberation time, as are the speech levels. Thus, the spatial relationship between a listener and the sound sources- both speech and noise-affects the optimal reverberation for speech intelligibility in rooms [1]. In this project, an experimental approach to identify the optimal reverberation time in an idealized room, and validate theoretical prediction, considering babble noise sources inside the room, is presented using auralization. Realistic optimal reverberation times are found using speech-intelligibility tests with normal-hearing and hard-of-hearing subjects. The best metric predicting speech intelligibility is presented for both normal-hearing and hard-of-hearing groups. 2. METHO