A method for prediction of listening score and psychological impression in an actual noise environment

The authors discuss a method for estimating and/or predicting the listening score and two psychological impressions of speech audibility and annoyance, when listening to audio signals, in an actual noise environment. The method introduced the instantaneous spectral distance that reflects the relationship between the spectral level of the speech peaks and that of noise within a short time scale. The validity and the applicability of the proposed method were confirmed experimentally, and reasonable results were obtained. Specifically, it is necessary to predict a psychological impression of the noise as a whole over a long period of time, after a certain amount of exposure to noise, taking the period of higher sound pressure level of the noise into consideration.