Conference_programme: 18.2 - Noise in children facilities
Lecture: A new methodology to study the children’s exposure to aircraft noise at school
Author(s): Bartalucci Chiara, Borchi Francesco, Carfagni Monica, Lapini Alessandro
Summary:
Many literary studies show a link between chronic exposure to noise and annoyance, problems with memory, attention and text comprehension. Moreover, other research demonstrate that children exposed for a long time to aircraft noise at schools show higher levels of stress, in addition to worst performance in mathematics, reading and text comprehension and to a minor attention span. Besides the necessity of better investigating about these trends, in this research field there is also the necessity of introducing new existing exposure-response curves based on updated data set the need to evaluate exposure-response curves specific for children in presence of aircraft noise.\nIn the current article, a new methodology to evaluate the aircraft noise perception of children, possible difficulties in text listening in presence of aircraft noise and the development of exposure-response curves is presented. The methodology has already been applied in a school located in correspondence of the A.Vespucci airport in Florence and consists in the following steps: measurements and characterization of real noise levels due to aircraft passages inside the classrooms; acoustic measurements of the façade acoustic insulation and of the reverberation times inside the classrooms; development and first test of an electroacoustic system able to reproduce the aircraft events at the desired time; real test of the system in presence of children concurrently with a text reading; submission of two questionnaires, the first in order to analyze the text comprehension skill and the second concerning general aircraft noise annoyance and the level of disturbance in function of different virtual classroom configurations. The same methodology, by using the same electroacoustic system reproducing the recorded airplane’s passage, will be then applied to another school which is not affected by aircraft noise, in order to test it on children who are not used to this typology of noise.\n
Corresponding author
Name: Dr Chiara Bartalucci
e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Country: Italy
