Acoustics
How sound behaves in a particular environment has a huge effect on how
well people hear. Folks with normal hearing are better able than folks
with hearing loss to extract speech from a din of background noise, but
it's no easy task even for them. Fortunately people are becoming more
aware of the importance of acoustics and are starting to modify
environments to promote communications rather than discourage it!
September 2006 - Here's an interesting
article that claims that the way we've been setting up rooms to optimize
sound is all wrong, because we've been measuring room acoustics wrong!
July 2007 - A Quiet
Day at the Office: Acoustics for People who are Hard of Hearing
November 2007 - Dinner with a din
February 2008 - What to do about noisy restaurants
March 2008 - High-pitched "Mosquito" Shoos Teens
October 2010 - The Secret of Architectural Acoustics
Revealed
August 2011 - Environmental design enhances hearing
rehabilitation
September 2011 - Sound, the Way the Brain Prefers to
Hear It
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November 2007
Walk into a restaurant with a friend, spouse or
significant other. Sit down, order a drink and start up a conversation in
your normal voice. Can you hear them? Can they hear you? In many
restaurants, the answer is no. And it's becoming the norm as dinner
conversations drown in a sea of background bar chatter and surround-sound
music systems. But if you think the people around you are to blame, think
again. Instead, blame a few staples of contemporary restaurant design -
hardwood floors and wide-open dining rooms, the exposed-brick facades and
large bay windows. They're the reasons patrons may resort to lip-reading
to talk at restaurants, says Tom Thunder, a Palatine-based audiologist and
acoustic engineer. 'It's the nature of the surfaces,' Thunder says. 'If
they're flat, hard and dense, they'll reflect sound almost perfectly. It's
like what a mirror does for light.'
Full Story
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February 2008
Restaurant diners -- when they can make themselves
heard above the blaring music from a chef's iPod playlist, the clatters
and shouts from an open kitchen, and the roar of the cocktail drinkers in
an adjacent lounge -- are talking about restaurant noise these days more
than the food. And the sound of that is finally reaching management ears.
To address higher than anticipated noise levels -- and diner complaints --
the new Los Angeles brasserie Comme Ça has put carpets under tables, and
Pizzeria Mozza has installed acoustic panels on its high walls. But don't
look for either popular restaurant to change its ethos, or radically alter
those noise levels.
Full Story
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March 2008
The Mosquito has landed - and the city's teens and
20-somethings are about to get bitten. A pesky new security device aims
to clear out young troublemakers from their hangouts in apartment-building
lobbies and foyers by emitting an irritating high-frequency screech that
can only be heard by young ears. The message: Buzz off. The British-made
Mosquito, used in 3,500 locations in the UK, costs $1,400, weighs five
pounds and looks like an innocuous wall-mounted speaker. But its obnoxious
85-decibel drone ranges as far as 60 feet and registers as a constant
screech to most people between the ages of 13 and 25.
Full Story
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October 2010
Have you ever noticed that your radio seems
awfully loud when you stop your car after listening on the highway? Or
have you ever felt that palpable sense of relief when the air conditioner
shuts off? We don't notice it but background noise determines what we can
hear and understand in the foreground. Sometimes we don't want to hear
everything. Imagine if you could hear and understand every conversation at
your offi ce. It would be terribly distracting. But when we do want to
hear every little thing in an important meeting, at a play or a concert,
at a religious service reducing background noise is critical. There are,
of course, many aspects to excellent acoustical design, but in these
spaces intended for listening what I call "criticallistening spaces"
strict control of noise is fundamental. Sources of noise include traffi c,
airplanes, machinery, plumbing, lights and people in other spaces. In
critical-listening spaces, the worst offender is usually the heating,
ventilating and air-conditioning system (HVAC).
Full Story
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August 2011
Many public and private listening environments
wreak havoc on adults with aging peripheral and central auditory systems.
Adults, who may have noted only some difficulty in specific degraded
listening environments at an earlier age, may experience extremely
frustrating difficulty in these same situations as they age. Older adults
may blame this difficulty on the speaker, when in fact the culprits may be
the reverberant characteristics of the meeting room, the anechoic
environment of their home, or the combined effects of auditory and visual
distractions in a multipurpose room within a health care facility. Without
recognizing this possibility, older adults may begin to avoid these places
and isolate themselves unnecessarily. For audiologists to provide
constructive hearing rehabilitation, they must become more than conversant
with their patients about the challenges and potential solutions regarding
environmental design, which has been shown to provide immediate benefits
for patients in many instances.
Full Story
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September 2011
Psychoacoustics has become an invaluable tool in
designing hearing aids and cochlear implants, and in the study of hearing
generally. "Psychoacoustics is fundamental," said Andrew J. Oxenham, a
psychologist and hearing expert at the University of Minnesota. "You need
to know how the normally functioning auditory system works - how sound
relates to human perception." The field's origins date back more than a
century, to the first efforts to quantify the psychological properties of
sound. What tones could humans hear, and how loudly or softly did they
need to be heard?
Full Story
