How To Enhance Classroom Acoustics

By Author: Henry Janice
Total Articles: 154
Comment this article

A school is a place for understanding and learning, but how will a student be able to learn properly, if they can’t even hear clearly? Today, we are going to discuss about the essence of classroom acoustics and how you can lessen noise in a classroom.
Human being has five senses, and hearing is possibly the second most vital sense. In a classroom, proper auditory conditions lead to better understanding of the words of the teacher, fast recognition and wise students.
What exactly is classroom acoustics?
The term “Acoustics” implies the way sound travels through a space. Better acoustics make sounds clearer and simpler to realize and differentiate from each other. Inferior acoustics will make sounds feel difficult to separate, feel jumbled, and usually more baffling than pleasant. It also implies how nice a sound might feel in your ear, and how much noise is there.
But what makes noise in a classroom? Initially, a teacher ...
... might think that noise in the classroom just entails students talking. While that is not wrong, it is just a small part of the actual picture. For instance, the own words of the teacher bouncing off the ceilings and the walls can also make noise.
In general, there are two types of noise in a classroom, echo and background noise.
Echo
Sound has a very reflective nature just like light. It bounces off the floors and ceilings and walls. That is not an issue with light as it is quite fast, but sound is quite low and a reflected sound reaches your ears after the actual sound. This causes baffle in the auditory processing centre of our brain. If there are different kinds of sounds echoing at a time, then these sound waves will complement each other and add up to higher magnitudes. It entails that this will get quite loud and almost drowns out the original.
Background noise
This term entails any sound that causes confusion and distraction with the sound you want to hear clearly. There can be various sources of background noise in a classroom like:

Machine sounds such as fans or AC
Vehicle sounds coming from the road or street outside the building
Voices from other classrooms
People talking in the hall
Other students talking in the room.

Essence of good acoustics in classrooms
A classroom with inferior acoustics causes many issues, not restricted to simply apprehending the communication of the teacher. 
Inferior listening conditions create a negative learning ambience for the students. Easy chores such as reading unfamiliar materials, understanding instructions, or trying to apprehend basic concepts can become unnecessarily difficult simply due to speech echo and constant background noise. A serene classroom with speech clarity is like a blessing that will cure many issues at once, and enhance the performance of the students to boot.