On the Quality of Hearing One's Own Voice

The way we perceive our own voice is being studied. Contrary to classical speech listening-quality experiments, where subjects judge the speech quality by listening, remaining silent themselves, in talking-quality experiments subjects judge the quality with which they perceive their own voices while actively speaking. In this way the self-listening comfort is measured. Six experiments were carried out. Five used a standard telephone setup where echo and distortions were introduced and judged by subjects on the disturbance. In one experiment subjects judged the talking quality of six different rooms. The subjective results were used to develop an objective perceptual talking-quality measure. The overall correlation between the subjectively perceived quality and the objectively measured quality was 0.97.