Introduction
Social interaction often occurs in noisy environments, making speech communication very demanding, especially for elderly and hearing-impaired individuals. When we communicate in these situations, we make an effort to adapt our voice to the acoustic environment and to the needs of our interlocutor, for example by speaking more slowly and loudly. The VoiceAdapt project investigates these situations focusing on the type of voice adaptations that are produced in noisy environments and whether they facilitate speech communication. The project, in collaboration with the University of Potsdam, is financed by the William Demant Foundation and by the Innovation Fund Denmark.
Aims
The purpose of this project is twofold. First, we aim to characterize the voice adaptations produced in noisy environments and to quantify the physical and cognitive effort required to speak in such acoustically adverse situations. Second, we aim to measure the effects of voice adaptations on speech understanding and listening effort for the listener. By conducting speech communication experiments with young normal-hearing and older hearing-impaired participants, we aim to provide knowledge that can support the development of hearing-assistive technologies, used to reduce the communication difficulty experienced in noisy environments.
Methodology
We designed an experiment where two participants (either both normal-hearing or a normal-hearing and a hearing-impaired) conduct a conversation. During the conversation we collect voice recordings, quantify how accurately speech is understood between participants and measure cognitive effort through pupil dilation. With separate control of the individual acoustic environments, we can expose none, only one, or both participants to noise and measure differences across these conditions in terms of voice adaptations, speech understanding and cognitive effort.
