Use of smartphones for introductory acoustics education

Abstract

In order to propose an effective method using smartphones (including tablets) of acoustics education for introductory courses of architectural and environmental acoustics in architectural studies, the authors have examined some applications which work on smartphones. As the first step, applications measuring sound level and spectrum at reasonable prices are chosen and their precision have been verified. Results showed that the most iOS devices has somewhat reasonable precision, e.g., for SPL measurement, it is similar to Class 2 sound level meter, though some Android devices give lower precision. Then, the authors introduced these tools to student and encouraged them to use these tools to produce a noise map (with dBA only and with both dBA and sound spectra). Even though these simple tools allow students to understand the relationship between their sensation and physical values. As further studies, the authors also tried to use some more applications which enables students to measure more advanced physical values, such as Band Levels, Leq, Impulse Responses, Reverberation Times, etc. Some examples of the measurement results of them are also presented.