Kategorie: ‘Noise’
Paper published: Listening effort in children and adults in classroom noise
We are happy to share the publication of our journal paper „Listening effort in children and adults in classroom noise“ in Scientific Reports as part of the Auditory processing and perception collection!
Julia Seitz, Karin Loh, and Janina Fels conducted a study to investigate listening effort in children aged 6-10 years and young adults using a child-appropriate dual-task paradigm. Realistic classroom scenarios with multi-talker babble noise at different signal-to-noise ratios in anechoic and simulated classroom environments were investigated.
The key findings
• Found differences in listening effort between noise conditions in 8-10-year-olds
• Demonstrated the importance of considering room effects in listening experiments
• Observed correlations between subjective and behavioral measures of listening effort
This research contributes to our understanding of how children process speech in noisy classroom environments and could help to improve learning conditions.
IEA HPT Annex 63 Meeting in Aachen
On October 23rd to 24th, 2024, the participants of the IEA HPT Annex 63 project met in Aachen for their first in-person meeting, hosted by RWTH Aachen University and HEAD Acoustics GmbH. Annex 63 is part of the International Energy Agency’s Heat Pumping Technologies initiative, focusing on the Placement Impact on Heat Pump Acoustics. The Annex 63 includes groups for five task areas: Building Acoustics Impact of Heat Pumps, Urban Acoustics Impact of Heat Pumps, Psychoacoustics of Heat Pumps, Digitally Assisted Heat Pump Placement, and Dissemination. During this fourth working meeting, all task groups presented their current status and opened up for discussions.
Our Institute is mainly involved in the third workgroup (Psychoacoustics of Heat Pumps), where the contents are closely linked to our research project LowNoise, in which the acoustic emissions of air-to-water heat pumps are investigated.
Besides the lively exchanges, the project members also got the chance to see the laboratory at HEAD Acoustics GmbH, as well as at the Institute for Energy Efficient Buildings and Indoor Climate and the Institute for Hearing Technology and Acoustics of the RWTH Aachen University. Thanks to everyone involved for their contributions, and a special thanks to Christoph Reichl from the Austrian Institute of Technology for organizing this interesting initiative, aiming to improve the noise impact of environment-friendly technologies such as heat pumps.
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- Photo: Jonas Klingebiel
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- Photo: Lukas Aspöck
Inter-Noise 2024 in Nantes
This year’s Inter-noise conference took place from August 25th to 29th in Nantes, France. More than 1500 delegates participated in this conference and presented interesting research in the field of acoustics and noise. Highlights of the conference included a plenary talk by Arnaud Can and Pierre Aumond (Joint Research Unit in Environmental Acoustics at Gustave Eiffel University, Nantes, France) on advanced characterization of urban sound environments and a keynote lecture about the child perspective on noise exposure and health effects, held by Kerstin Persson Waye from Gothenburg University, Sweden, who is also collaborating with IHTA in the Equal-Life project.
Members of IHTA travelled to the conference and presented the following research papers:
- Chalotorn Möhlmann: Validation measurement of vehicle pass-by models for dynamic urban environments (results of the BaLSaM project)
- Marco Berzborn: Inference of the acoustic properties of transversely isotropic porous materials
- Lara Stürenburg: Loudness and preference judgments for noises of a heat pump (results of the LowNoise project)
- Joao Fatela (Guest researcher from the University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli, Naples, Italy):
An experimental setup to investigate relevant validation parameters for the auralization of commercial aircraft flyovers in complex urban contexts
Directly after the closing ceremony of the conference, the satellite workshop “Unlocking the Potential of Open Research Software in Acoustics at Inter-Noise 2024” started. This event was organized by Maarten Hornikx and Huiqing Wang, from the Building Acoustics team of Eindhoven University of Technology, and included interesting exchanges and presentation on the development, maintenance, documentation and distrubtion of acoustics-related open-source software. As one of four invited speakers, Lukas Aspöck held a presentation about IHTA’s auralization software Virtual Acoustics. The slides of this presentation are available for download (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Next to insightful overview presentations by Maarten Hornikx and Huiqing Wang, further successful research software was presented: Pyroomacoustics by Eric Bezzam, NoiseModelling by Pierre Aumond and SoundScapy by Andrew Mitchell, along with many examples of challanges and best practices for open research and open-source software development. Many thanks to Maarten and his team for the invitation and the organization of this exciting event.
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- Entrance of the InterNoise venue. Photo: Lukas Aspöck
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- Exhibition area at Internoise. Photo: Simon Bianchetti.
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- Internoise 2024 Macarons. Photo: Lukas Aspöck
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- Kerstin Persson Waye at her keynote presentation. Photo: Simon Bianchetti.
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- Jam Session @ InterNoise. Photo: Lukas Aspöck
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- Lara during her presentation. Photo: Lara Stürenburg.
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- Chalotorn during his presentation. Photo: Carolin Schliephake.
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- Lukas during the research software workshop. Photo: Enkela Alimadhi
