Room acoustic conditions of schools, a church, and a residential premise for hearing impaired people

It has been known that hearing impaired people need more strict room acoustic requirements than normal hearing people for verbal communications. Therefore, The American speech-language-hearing association (ASHA) recommends a maximum reverberation time of 0.4 s in classrooms, signal to noise ratios (SNR) higher than 15 dB, and ambient noise levels lower than 35 dBA.

We measured noise levels and room impulse responses from 18 rooms in two schools for hearing impaired children, a dormitory with 3 rooms, and a church mainly for the hearing impaired in the Republic of Korea and extracted room acoustic parameters. A questionnaire was distributed to obtain subjective reverberance and quality of verbal communication and well-being.

The present study will discuss the correlation between the objective acoustic parameters and users’ satisfaction in terms of acoustic conditions.