Citation

Lee PJ, Jeon JY. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 2011; 130(1): 219.

Affiliation

Department of Architectural Engineering, Hanyang University, Seoul 133-791, South Korea.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2011, American Institute of Physics)

DOI

10.1121/1.3598455

PMID

21786892

Abstract

In the present study, the effects of interference from combined noises on speech transmission were investigated in a simulated open public space. Sound fields for dominant noises were predicted using a typical urban square model surrounded by buildings. Then road traffic noise and two types of construction noises, corresponding to stationary and impulsive noises, were selected as background noises. Listening tests were performed on a group of adults, and the quality of speech transmission was evaluated using listening difficulty as well as intelligibility scores. During the listening tests, two factors that affect speech transmission performance were considered: (1) temporal characteristics of construction noise (stationary or impulsive) and (2) the levels of the construction and road traffic noises. The results indicated that word intelligibility scores and listening difficulty ratings were affected by the temporal characteristics of construction noise due to fluctuations in the background noise level. It was also observed that listening difficulty is unable to describe the speech transmission in noisy open public spaces showing larger variation than did word intelligibility scores.

Language: en