This study presents the assessment of the quality of speech intelligibility of two Malaysian mosques and the results are used to develop a set of general acoustical guidelines to be used in the design of a mosque. Two mosques were selected for the research: Masjid UPM and the Masjid Jamek. The objective of the research is to enable the comparison of the acoustics and speech intelligibility betw...

Speech intelligibility is an important factor for successful speech communication in today’s society. So-called near-end listening enhancement (NELE) algorithms aim at improving speech intelligibility in conditions where the (clean) speech signal is accessible and can be modified prior to its presentation. However, many of these algorithms only consider the detrimental effect of noise and disre...

In many cases the intelligibility of speech in noise may be assumed independent of the absolute sound level; the speech-to-noise ratio (SNR) primarily determines intelligibility. However, at high sound levels, speech intelligibility is found to decrease. Subjective Speech Reception Threshold (SRT) measurements were performed at various speech and noise levels, and with various noise spectra. De...

The quality of the communication between teachers and students and ultimately, of classroom education itself, is closely linked to the acoustic quality of the auditorium. This acoustic quality can be characterized based on the reverberation time (RT), speech transmission index (STI) and the sound insulation. In this context, an acoustic study was conducted in an auditorium located in the Higher...

The Speech Transmission Index (STI) is based on acoustic measurements in environments and has been shown to be correlated with speech intelligibility under a wide range of acoustic conditions (Houtgast & Steeneken 1984). It is a weighted average of metrics derived from envelope signals in multiple frequency bands spanning the speech spectrum. A variety of methods have been proposed to compute t...

The subjective Chinese (Mandarin) articulation scores of a total of 50 sound conditions, namely at 12 receiver positions in four rooms, were obtained by expert listeners based on in-situ measured binaural room impulse responses (BRIRs) and binaural technology for headphone reproduction from a phonetically balanced test. The relationship between Chinese speech articulation scores and the speech ...

PURPOSE To analyze the acoustic parameters of classrooms and the relationship among equivalent sound pressure level (Leq), reverberation time (T₃₀), the Speech Transmission Index (STI), and the performance of students in speech intelligibility testing. METHODS A cross-sectional descriptive study, which analyzed the acoustic performance of 18 classrooms in 9 public schools in Belo Horizonte, M...

OFDM scrambling is one of the most popular techniques for secure communication. This paper proposes a new scrambling technique based on random permutation with the pseudo random binary generator to improve the performance of OFDM scrambler. To measure the intelligibility of speech, speech transmission index (STI) and common intelligibility scale (CIS) are used. The Bit Error Rate (BER) and Sign...

OBJECTIVES The purpose of this study is to evaluate the performance of a number of speech intelligibility indices in terms of predicting the intelligibility of vocoded speech. DESIGN Noise-corrupted sentences were vocoded in a total of 80 conditions, involving three different signal-to-noise ratio levels (-5, 0, and 5 dB) and two types of maskers (steady state noise and two-talker). Tone-voco...

According to several independent field surveys, noise is the most adverse factor of indoor environment in open offices. Speech has been rated as the most distracting sound source. Laboratory experiments have shown that speech impairs the performance of cognitively demanding tasks, e.g. verbal and memory recall tasks. Speech intelligibility determines the distracting power of speech primarily, n...