Auditory processing of reverberation: perceptual and computational investigations

描述（由申请人提供）：人类经常会遇到混响声音，为了准确地解释声学数据，混响处理必须是人类听觉的一个基本方面。然而，人们对人类听觉系统如何检测混响并随后处理混响信号知之甚少。此外，与健康的人类听众相比，最先进的计算去噪算法表现不佳。听力受损的听众，无论是否植入人工耳蜗，在混响环境中往往表现出理解力下降。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Humans commonly encounter reverberant sounds and, in order to accurately interpret acoustic data, reverberation processing must be a fundamental aspect of human audition. However, little is known about how the human auditory system detects reverberation, and subsequently processes reverberant signals. In addition, state-of- the-art computational dereverberation algorithms perform poorly compared with healthy human listeners. Hearing-impaired listeners, with and without cochlear implants, often show decreased comprehension in reverberant environments. Human perception of reverberation will be explored via two experimental methods: (1) Systematic measurement of reverberation properties in real-word spaces. This will measure the distribution of reverberation filter properties that humans regularly encounter. (2) Perceptual experiments with synthetic sources or synthetic reverberation filters. Volunteer listeners will judge synthetic sounds as "reverberant" or "dry" and attempt to match sources and filters. It is hypothesized that the auditory system must make assumptions about the source and/or filter to perceptually separate the two and if the synthetic source/filter violates these assumptions, listener's ability to correctly identify them from reverberant recordings will degrade. The broader objective of this work is to gain a basic understanding of how quantitative changes in an acoustic signal, affect both the perceived sound and sense of space in human listeners. Such work will inform the design of future audition experiments, cochlear implants, public-announcement systems for large reverberant spaces and automated voice-recognition systems for human-computer-interfaces.