Acoustic Level and Vocal Effort as Cues for the Loudness of Speech

Abstract

A review of previous studies of speech loudness shows great variability in the derived psychophysical functions relating loudness to speech power [i.e., sound-pressure level (SPL)] and other physical and psychological measures, such as subglottal pressure (SGP) and vocal effort. This paper argues that, because of the complex nature of speech production and perception, traditional scaling procedures that yield exponential relations between loudness and some other measure should be replaced by multidimensional techniques. Two experiments on speech loudness scaling using partial correlation analysis demonstrate that loudness judgments depend upon both acoustic cues, as measured by peak SPL, and vocal effort cues, as measured by peak SGP in one experiment and subjective effort in the other. The relative dependencies upon these cues are different for different listeners and are at least somewhat resistant to distortion via signal attenuation and/or masking with white noise. These differences between listeners might be exploited in the search for relationships between speaking and listening.

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