Subjective and objective evaluations of classrooms and lecture halls

Speech intelligibility tests were given to groups of college students in ten classrooms and lecture halls of various sizes on the University of Florida campus. A series of acoustical measurements including reverberation time, early reverberation time, loudness, early to late temporal energy ratios, lateral energy fractions, interaural cross correlation, and speech transmission index were made at multiple locations in each of the rooms. Correlation analysis and statistical modeling identified significant relationships among intelligibility scores of the listeners with the physical measurements made in the room. Special attention was given to the architectural characteristics of the rooms in the analysis. The variations in intelligibility scores and the physical measurements among the different rooms and within each of the rooms are presented. [Work supported by NSF.]