Quantifying teachers’ response to acoustic environments: a review of several recent studies

Abstract

School teachers have an elevated risk of voice problems due to the vocal demands in the workplace. This presentation summarizes the results of several studies investigating voice use in real and simulated classroom settings. The first study used 57 teachers, who were monitored all day for 2 weeks in teaching and nonteaching environments. In the second study of short-term responses to room conditions, the speech of 20 talkers was analyzed in order to evaluate how voice production and effort were affected by speaking style, room acoustics (added background noise, presence of early reflections), and short-term vocal fatigue in a single room. A third study investigated the effects of voice production and perception due to visually concealed acoustic changes (both noise and reverberation) while speaking in a room. In all studies, talkers significantly adjusted their voice production to both dramatic and seemingly small acoustic changes. Both teaching experience and biological sex were factors in participant response differences.