Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused many communities to require or at least recommend the wearing of face coverings, masks, and/or shields inside indoor public spaces to reduce the transmission rate of the virus. Several types of face coverings are studied, including standardized N95 and KN95, assorted cloth, and clear plastic face shields. They are evaluated on an acoustical head and torso simulator (HATS) setup in a classroom with two different locations for monitoring via a sound level meter. The HATS is used as a controlled and repeatable artificial voice or sound source, which reproduces the ITU-T artificial speech signals as well as playback of real speech signals for American English, male and female voices. The signals are recorded with a sound level meter at a distance of 2 and 6 m between source and receiver in a classroom environment. These signals evaluated in time and frequency domains to better understand the acoustical difference between the no-mask and various masks conditions. These are compared with the same classroom environment but using white noise test signals.
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