Listening in complex acoustic scenarios: Ongoing advances on methodologies and approaches in relation to classrooms

The acoustic quality of the built environment where we spend our days strongly affects our social life and indirectly our health. Particularly, people with a hearing impairment (usually related to ageing), children with or without learning disorders and non-native speakers, require better room acoustics to enhance speech communication and be included in the challenging multicultural processes. In the specific framework of children in their everyday learning environments, i.e., in classrooms, enhanced speech intelligibility (SI) is necessary. Noise and reverberation in classrooms degrade SI, but the combined effect of reverberation, informational noise and position of target, listener and noise source on SI still needs insights. This work provides an overview on the recent research carried out in the field of SI under complex acoustic scenarios. Results from in-field measurements as well as from advanced predictive models will be presented and discussed. Particularly, measurements were integrated with listening tests based on the Matrix material, since it has been optimized for the Italian language and for many other foreign languages. Concerning the predictions’ results, the Binaural Speech Intelligibility Model (BSIM) implemented at the University of Oldenburg was used to validate an accurate method to predict the listeners’ ability at the classroom’s design stage.