Proceedings of the 11th Convention of the
European Acoustics Association
Forum Acusticum / EuroNoise 2025


Málaga, Spain
June 23 - 26, 2025





Session: A16.06 Source directivity: capturing, processing, and evaluating its effects
Date: Tuesday 24 June 2025
Time: 15:00
Title: Impact of leg diffraction and scattering on voice directivity patterns
Author(s): Samuel Bellows
Brian F. G. Katz
Timothy Leishman
Pages: 4473-4480
DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.61782/fa.2025.0448
PDF: https://dael.euracoustics.org/confs/fa2025/data/articles/000448.pdf
Conference proceedings
Abstract

Understanding sound radiation from the human voice has broad applications in room acoustical design, telecommunications, physical modeling of the singing voice, and virtual acoustics. Head simulators and head and torso simulators can provide simplified approximations to voice directivity, which motivate their use in room acoustical and other related measurements. Nonetheless, recent works have shown that scattering and diffraction due to the torso alter speech radiation patterns compared to those produced from an isolated head alone. Despite the improvements that including a torso provides, most commercial voice simulators neglect the effects of human legs. To better understand the impact of leg scattering and diffraction on voice directivity, this work presents measurements of a manikin with a head, torso, and legs. Comparing the results with those measured from human talkers shows that scattering and diffraction from human legs can impact voice radiation patterns, particularly above 1 kHz. The results also highlight the importance of high spatial sampling resolution when performing directivity measurements, as these scattering effects are easily spatially aliased in lower resolution sampling schemes.