Effect of Head Orientation on Speech Directivity

The directional characteristics of human speech have many applications in speech acoustics, audio, telecommunications, room acoustical design, and other areas. However, professionals in these fields require carefully conducted, high-resolution, spherical speech directivity measurements taken under distinct circumstances to gain additional insights for their work. Because head orientation and human-body diffraction influence speech radiation, this work explores such effects under various controlled conditions through the changing directivity patterns of a head and torso simulator. The results show that head orientation and body diffraction at low frequencies impact directivities only slightly. However, the effects are more substantial at higher frequencies, particularly above 1 kHz.