How do echoes and the listening distance affect the ease of listening?

What is it about?

We conducted a multitasking experiment in an echoy room to understand how echoes and listening distances affect the ease of listening for normal-hearing adults. We highlighted how echoes affect our ease of listening differently depending on how far away we are from the talker.

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Why is it important?

Echoy rooms are very common in our daily lives, concert halls, gyms, big lecture halls, or even homes with high ceilings! Other than knowing how well we can understand speech in these environments, we also need to know how hard we need to work (i.e., listening) to achieve certain level of understanding. Often times two different listeners can understand the same conversation equally well, but one person may feel more exhausted at the end of the day than the other. Therefore understanding ease of listening is important and relevant to our lives.

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