Socially-distanced psychoacoustics: A remote study on flutter echo

The impetus for this pilot study was the observation of flutter echoes on the aisle of a church with a barrel-vaulted ceiling. The echoes were highly disruptive to speech communication, as they exhibited a 39-ms repeating pattern of pulses persisting with a high reverberation time. The original plan was to conduct testing on the SUNY New Paltz campus to assess the perceived pitch, pitch strength, and annoyance of acoustic analogs of flutter echoes. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the study was adapted to a fully remote format. Fifteen adult college students participated in this study by performing three subjective listening tasks in two virtual sessions. Participants were required to pass a hearing screening that was self-administered via a cell phone application. Each participant used their personal earphones and computer to remotely access the testing software. Participants were trained, instructed, and monitored via Blackboard Collaborate Ultra. Transitioning the psychoacoustic study into a remote platform was successful, as participants were able to complete all three tasks in all sessions. Statistically significant differences were found with pitch strength tasks. However, there were very few statistically significant differences in annoyance of the different pulse trains due to high variability, which may have been due to the uncontrolled testing environments and presentation levels. Further study in this area would require more rigorously controlled testing.