Question: what do you study

Sarah Knight answered on 13 Nov 2019:

I’m interested in why we get distracted by background noise when we’re trying to listen to another person speaking. I’m also trying to find out what kinds of background noises are particularly distracting. My studies usually involve creating sound recordings for people to listen to, and then recording their responses to analyse later. For example, I might record somebody talking, then mix the speech with a recording of background noise to make it harder to hear. I’ll then play people these “noisy” recordings and see how much of the speech they could understand, and compare this for different types of background noise. I’m also interested in other aspects of how we hear sound and speech — for example, the judgements we make about people from their voices, and what makes people’s voices sound trustworthy.