Studying Various Acoustical Environments and Their Effect on Listening Comprehension

Overview

The acoustical reverberation of a room affects both music and speech. Therefore, developing quantitative methods to evaluate a room’s acoustics is valuable. The research conducted in this project studied and developed techniques for measuring reverberant sound intensity and decay time as a way of comparing the acoustics of various rooms. Three rooms of varying absorption were compared: a bedroom, a foyer, and a bathroom. In the first experiment, the effect of reverberation on the inverse-square relationship between sound intensity and distance was measured. Second, to better analyze the duration of reverberation, the decay of a steady signal was analyzed using oscilloscope and audio recording softwares. The reverberation decay times for each room were calculated using two different methods and the results were compared. The overall analysis showed that the reverberation strength increased with decreased absorption and the duration increased with volume. The final experiment conducted tests on human subjects to determine how well different phonemes can be distinguished in the three different listening environments. Based on the results, reverberation characterized by a strong intensity and short duration is actually beneficial for clearly understanding speech. This dispels the common misconception that all reverberation negatively impacts speech. The results of this project are highly beneficial to the designs of classrooms and other spaces used for speech and conversation.

Competition history

• AJAS 2019 Category not listed

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

• AJAS None projects
• Every AJAS 2019 project