Spatial release from masking for binaural reproduction of speech in noise with varying spherical harmonics order

Abstract Spatial release from masking (SRM) in the context of speech perception denotes the improvement of speech intelligibility in noise when the speech and the noise sources are spatially separated in space. A similar effect has been reported with binaural sound reproduction (BSR), in which speech and noise are simulated and reproduced using headphones. The effect of SRM on speech intelligibility using BSR has not yet been thoroughly studied for signals represented by different spherical harmonic (SH) orders. This may be important when speech corrupted by noise is delivered in spatial audio channels, such as Ambisonics and higher order Ambisonics. In this work, a hearing in noise test (HINT) is performed in which a female speaker and noise are binaurally reproduced using headphones under different SH orders and different signal to noise ratio (SNR) values. The results show that a first SH order is sufficient to achieve intelligibility that is as good as the highest SH order used in this work.