Auralization of acoustic design in primary school classrooms

Classrooms often have high reverberation times and people often experience high background noise levels. These factors affect communication and thus learning outcomes, and may even affect the health of teachers and pupils. Acoustic characteristics of classrooms have been previously studied mainly in the context of speech perception but here we also consider subjective impression during acoustic design. In this work, we demonstrate an interactive, real-time audio-visual simulation of an elementary school classroom with variable acoustic parameters using virtual reality. The demonstration was realized in the real-time Simulated Open Field Environment (rtSOFE), a calibrated, loudspeaker-based spatial auralization system in an anechoic chamber, which also features 3D video projection. The simulated classroom with a maximum capacity of thirty pupils has been designed with five different configurations of sound-reflecting and sound-absorbing panels. The listener can change the configurations parameters instantaneously, interactively explore the environment by placing a sound source at different positions and change the listening positions of the virtual receiver. Participants can experience the pupil’s point of view in terms of the visual perspective and understanding speech in the presence of background noise. The goal is to develop and test tool that could lead to a more spatially and subjectively aware acoustic design.