Acoustic Parameters of Classrooms in Akwa Ibom State, South-South Nigeria

Abstract

It has been proven that acoustic conditions in classrooms have great influence on the performance of students and give stress to the teachers. Long reverberation time may also deteriorate speech quality by reducing the signal to noise ratio (SNR). This work aimed at predicting the absorption “a” and thereby calculating the reverberation time of some classrooms in Akwa Ibom State, South-South Nigeria using simple Sabin equations and to make appropriate recommendations where they fall short of the recommended standard of 0.75 to 1.00 seconds for classrooms and lecture halls. Effective absorption coefficients of materials used for the construction of the classrooms under study were used for the calculation of the absorption of these classrooms while the Sabin equation was used to calculate the reverberation time. The results show that all the classrooms under study which were representatives of the classrooms in the area of study had reverberation time that were within the recommendation time of 0.75 to 1.00 seconds. The classrooms in the area of study could be certified to be good for lecture delivery by the teachers , good speech intelligibility and lecture assimilation of the students.

Keywords: Absorption coefficient, Absorption, Reverberation time, Speech intelligibility

DOI: 10.7176/JEES/11-9-05

Publication date:September 30^th 2021