A concept to evaluate activity-based acoustic settings in primary schools appropriate for children’s hearing

Abstract

Objective description of noise perception in educational buildings is a complex topic. In this process, it is desirable to incorporate temporal and spectral features of the noise environment while taking the human characteristics of sound perception in the situation into account. The goal is to establish a realistic representation of existing noise exposures during daily activities in primary schools, especially for children. However, the noise is strongly dependent on the daily activities carried out by the teachers and children present in the examined educational buildings. For example, silent work will have significantly lower noise levels than group work. This work proposes a method to describe in-situ acoustic settings within different types of activities objectively. Two concepts on how to differentiate the activity-based acoustic settings are presented and evaluated using psychoacoustic parameters versus the traditional noise assessment parameter, A-weighted sound pressure level. The parameters are obtained from standard and binaural measurement methods. The focus in this work is to add children’s point of view into the evaluation by integrating measurements using a child artificial head.