Steady-state pre-processing for impro in reverberant enviro Evaluation in a hall with an elec

To improve speech intelligibility in reverberant environments, Arai et al. proposed the methods of “steady-state suppression” (Arai, 2002) and “steady-state zero-padding” (Arai, 2005) as a pre-processing method. We conducted two perceptual experiments to evaluate and compare these methods in a hall with an electrical reverberator. The advantage of using this electrical reverberator is that the same subjects are able to participate in the experiments with many different reverberant conditions (reverberation time was varied from 2.6-3.3s, in this study). As results, steady-state suppression showed the floor effect under these reverberant conditions, whereas steady-state zero-padding yielded significant improvements in terms of the speech intelligibility in the same reverberant conditions.