Novel approaches towards more ’real-life’ listening experiments in complex acoustic scenes

Abstract

In real-life listening situations, we often listen to speech inside rooms with different room acoustics conditions and in the presence of masking noise. Most everyday listening situations consist not only of direct sound from multiple sound sources, but also numerous reflections reaching our ears caused by the physical environment. These listening situations are challenging for adults as well as especially for children. Acoustic environments in educational institutions (schools and kindergarten) are usually highly complex and noisy, hence it is demanding to identify relevant target speakers and to ignore irrelevant sounds. Two approaches will be presented to include more real-life aspects of listening situations in complex acoustic scenes. The first approach is a speech-in-noise test, investigating effects of a moving masker including room acoustic effects in young and elderly listeners. The second approach is an auditory selective attention paradigm, which has been evaluated with adults, both in dichotic and binaural listening environments. To also meet the needs of children, the auditory selective attention paradigm was adapted and validated with children. In this talk, we will highlight important (binaural) features in the transformation of experiments from simple instances of audio reproductions towards more life-like listening situations.