Effect of adding artificial reverberation to speech-like masking sound

• Speech-like masking sound is known to effectively mask information in speech.
• Annoyance and distraction caused by the masking sound are higher than noise maskers.
• Effects of adding reverberation to a speech-like masking sound are investigated.
• Annoyance level was reduced while maintaining the masking effectiveness.

Time-reversed speech has been known to effectively mask information for speech privacy applications. However, the annoyance and distraction caused by the time-reversed speech-like masking sound is higher than other masking sound. This study investigates the effects of adding artificial reverberation to the time-reversed speech. Subjective listening tests have been conducted to measure the intelligibility of target speech, annoyance and distraction caused by the masking sound. The experimental results suggest that adding artificial reverberation to a speech-like masking sound has a significant effect to reduce the annoyance level while maintaining the masking effectiveness of the original masking sound. A trend was also observed that the addition of artificial reverberation could reduce the level of distraction caused by the masking sound.