Speech-to-screen : spatial separation of dialogue from noise towards improved speech intelligibility for the small screen

Can externalizing dialogue when in the presence of stereo background noise improve speech intelligibility? This has been investigated for audio over headphones using head-tracking in order to explore potential future developments for small-screen devices. A quantitative listening experiment tasked participants with identifying target words in spoken sentences played in the presence of background noise via headphones. Sixteen different combinations of three independent variables were tested: speech and noise locations (internalized/externalized), video (on/off), and masking noise (stationary/fluctuating noise). The results revealed that the best improvements to speech intelligibility were generated by both the video-on condition and externalizing speech at the screen while retaining masking noise in the stereo mix.

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