Background noise and room acoustics may impede social interactions by interfering with oral communication and other cognitive processes. Accordingly, recent research in school environments has showed that social relationships with peers and teachers are described more negatively in rooms with long reverberation times (RT). The purpose of this study was to investigate how RT and hearing ability ...

This contribution briefly reviews the reverberation mapping technique which leads to determination of black hole masses. I focus on the emerging relation between the broad-line region size and the active galactic nucleus (AGN) luminosity, and on an overview of recent results of reverberation mapping studies which are starting to cover the full AGN luminosity range. Preliminary results and time ...

Many multi-channel dereverberation and noise reduction techniques such as the multi-channel Wiener filter (MWF) require an estimate of the late reverberation and noise power spectral densities (PSDs). State-of-the-art multi-channel methods for estimating the late reverberation PSD typically assume that the noise PSD matrix is known. Instead of assuming that the noise PSD matrix is known, in thi...

Room acoustic parameters are key information for dereverberation or speech recognition. Usually, when one needs to assess the level of reverberation, only the reverberation time RT60 or a direct to reverberant sounds index Dτ is estimated. Yet, methods which blindly estimate the reverberation time from reverberant recorded speech do not always differentiate the RT60 from the Dτ to evaluate the ...

PURPOSE To study the perceptual consequences of changes in parameters of vocoded speech in various reverberation conditions. METHOD The 3 controlled variables were number of vocoder bands, instantaneous frequency change rate, and reverberation conditions. The effects were quantified in terms of (a) nonsense words' recognition scores for young normal-hearing listeners, (b) ease of listening ba...

The purpose of this experiment was to investigate whether classroom reverberation influences second-language (L2) listening comprehension. Moreover, we investigated whether individual differences in baseline L2 proficiency and in working memory capacity (WMC) modulate the effect of reverberation time on L2 listening comprehension. The results showed that L2 listening comprehension decreased as ...

Designing a proper acoustical environment--indispensable to speech recognition--in long enclosures is difficult. Although there is some literature on the acoustical conditions in underground stations, there is still little information about methods that make estimation of correct reverberation conditions possible. This paper discusses the assessment of the reverberation conditions of undergroun...

Time reversal mirrors have been applied to focus energy at probe source locations and point scatterers in inhomogeneous media. In this paper, we investigate the application of a time reversal mirror to rough interface reverberation processing in a waveguide. The method is based on the decomposition of the time reversal operator which is computed from the transfer matrix measured on a source-rec...