Conference_programme: 18.3 - Voice accommodations in room acoustics and noise
Lecture: Sound reflections that support teaching and learning
Author(s): Christensson Jonas
Summary:
It´s important that class rooms provide good conditions for both listeners and speakers. To listen without effort is important for learning, and we know that poor room acoustics is a burden that impedes learning and have a negative effect on teachers voice health.\nThen we listen to a speaker in a room, we hear the speakers voice and the sound reflections from the surfaces in the room. The sound reflections have a great impact on both the speaker and the listeners. In most languages the information is carried out by the consonants, looking at the speech spectra we see that most vowels are low in frequency and high in strengths and most consonants are low in strength and higher in frequency. If the room reflections amplify the lower frequencies the “strong” vowels will be “stronger” and have a masking effect on the consonants. These rooms have low speech intelligibility. To create good speech intelligibility it is important that the surfaces in the room amplify the higher frequencies.\nA place that amplifies the higher frequencies is the Swedish forests. I have made several listening and speaking tests in different forests. Most people feel that it´s very easy to understand what the speaker says, good speech intelligibility, and it´s also very pleasant to speak in a forest, good speak comfort. I have measured the sound reflections in different forests. The results are interesting and I mean that “forest acoustics” should be the goal in terms of acoustic conditions in class rooms.\n
Corresponding author
Name: Mr Jonas Christensson
e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Country: Sweden
