Final Thesis

The voice within a lecture hall: An acoustic case study

Studies show that more than 40% of professional voice users experience some kind of voice disorder. One reason for the voice disorder could be attributed to the poor acoustic condition of the surrounding space (loud background noise, long reverberation, etc.). One special case are lecture halls, where the acoustic condition is of utmost importance: first, for a sufficient speech intelligibility for the listeners, and second, as a filter/amplifier for lecturer who teach or give a presentation. In this thesis, lecture halls of RWTH should be assessed in terms of their acoustic condition and linked to voice quality analysis as additional assessment parameter.

In the first part of your thesis, you will carry out acoustic measurements in the 10 largest lecture halls of RWTH, evaluating reverberation time, speech intelligibility and background noise acc. to ISO 3382. In a previous work, a spider chart was created to analyze room acoustic parameter at one glance.This spider chart serves as a template for the analysis and can be extended with further parameter.

In the second part of the thesis, you will conduct an acoustic voice analysis with praat, evaluating the voice condition of lecturer (before and after class). The question is, if vocal fatigue can be (1) assessed with simple voice analysis and (2) linked to the acoustic condition of the room.

Requirements:

- Interest in room acoustics, medical acoustics, and measurement techniques
- Understanding of fundamentals of acoustics, Medical Acoustics: Audiology and Voice