The importance of ongoing observations in educational spaces to understand and reflect changing acoustical environments

Abstract

In the past, observations to understand room acoustics were considered as an important tool and were performed to establish and develop acoustic experiments, parameters, and measurements. As the objective data have been collected, the standardized methods have been playing important roles in judgment and improvement of acoustical environments in educational spaces. These days, the standards for experiments or measurements have been commonly used to understand the quality of acoustic environments. Architectural soundscape has strongly suggested ongoing observations in order to reflect changing acoustic environments even though they show reliable and concrete data. For example, as the transition of educational environments has been made, the roles of teachers and students have been expanding to ones of each other. Also, the perceptions of sound have been rapidly changing since teachers’ and students’ diverse experience of industrial and electrical sonic environments have been changing rapidly. In this paper, observations on acoustic events in classrooms were taken to understand the changes in acoustical environments based on architectural soundscape in order how to change measurement settings or analysis methods. Also, acoustical measurements were conducted with diverse measurements setting including various positions of sound sources and receivers based on diverse educational arrangements shown in the results of the observations.