Group Conversation Assessment in Realistic Acoustic Scenes

Successful communication in background noise is a continuous interaction between conversation partners. They continuously exchange conscious, unconscious, verbal, and non-verbal information regarding how well the other person is understood. Human communication is not limited to one-on-one interactions but can also happen in group conversation situations. The complexity of taking an active part in a group conversation is much higher though, since the continuous interaction happens with more than one conversation partner at the same time. To investigate human communication behavior, real conversations between groups of six people were observed in the Sonova Real Life Lab. All participants were allowed to move around freely within the lab space. The head position and orientation of all six participants was continuously monitored with an optical motion capturing system. The voices of all participants were recorded with wireless headset microphones, which allowed to assess individual vocal effort. During the conversation situation, background noise was played from all four directions simultaneously and systematically varied in overall level. The individual position data and vocal effort were used to estimate perceived communication difficulty and signal to noise ratios. The head orientation data was analyzed to estimate which individuals the participants were talking and listening to.