Short Description

There has been a long history of research investigating the effect of room acoustics, background noise and competing speakers on speech communication. On the one hand, research focused on estimating the cognitive load and the speech processing performance of listeners in specific noise conditions (e.g., on how many words can be recognized or memorized correctly), on the other hand, the individual response of a speaker that a specific vocal demand will cause. The impact the room has on communication is not always straight forward. Whereas a certain amount of reverberation supports the voice of the speaker, too much reverberation decreases speech intelligibility and increases noise. In the last semester, we have recorded 6 persons in hybrid meetings in two room acoustic scenarios. The aims of this project are 1) to analyze which aspects of speech change in the two different room acoustic scenarios and 2) to compare the speech characteristics of the persons joining the meeting wia Webex to the speech characteristics of those who were present in the room together. Since we also collected questionnaires on how participants perceived communication quality, aim 3) is to relate acoustic evidence to the perceived communication quality.

Your Tasks (depending on specific project):

• Adapt existing acoustic speech-feature extraction toolboxes available at SPSC Laboratory for the used materials
• Use statistical methods to find those acoustic features that change in the speech before and after the room-acoustic improvement

Your Profile

• Some background in speech processing
• good knowledge of programming (ideally Python)
• interest in combining quantiative (statistical) and qualitative (listening in detail) analysis of speech

Contact:

Barbara Schuppler (b.schuppler@tugraz.at)