Monaural and binaural perception of speech in complex scenes: recent results on the role of correlation

The perception of speech and its intelligibility have long been studied in relation to monaural factors (i.e. reverberation and clarity). On the other hand, especially in more complex settings, binaural hearing is necessary to achieve performance. The deployment of effective binaural processes is strongly influenced by the layout of source, masker(s) and receivers, by reverberation and also by the type of reflections in the impulse response. Scattered reflections are well-known to provide a spatially spread wavefront, a time-distributed response and uncorrelated binaural signals compared to specular ones. This work discusses the various effects mentioned above and presents some recent results on the role of correlation in this context.