Contribution
Towards Contemporary Edison Tests - Part 1: Designing a plausibility test for speech reproduction
* Presenting author
Abstract:
At the turn of the last century, the Edison company conducted commercial demonstrations of their phonograph technology by letting listeners compare human musicians against reproductions thereof. Since those demonstrations, a goal of audio reproduction systems has been to confuse listeners between real sound and reproduced sound. However, no formal listening experiments of this kind have been reported. In this contribution, we describe the development of a test design aimed at conducting such experiments; participants are tasked with discerning whether they are hearing a live human speaker or a loudspeaker. This initiative lays the foundation for future tests comparing real human speech with binaural rendering instead of loudspeaker reproduction. Passing such a test is a major goal for future AR telecommunication technologies.