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AcousticsThe science of acoustics is very technical, and it's very easy to become completely overwhelmed with numbers for this and graphs for that. Acoustics is the direct application of earshot for every tiny little noise, medium noise, big noise, huge noise, surprise noise, far away noise, close up noise, all the noises, and the silences in a place. A battleground is set up for human communication in spite of too many noises,millions of individual noises. I think most of us in North America are completely overwhelmed with noise. If we live in the city we have cars and trucks and buses and horns and sirens and barking dogs and lawn mowers and leaf blowers. If we live in the country we have off road vehicles, farm equipment. Our neighbours live a full farm field away, and have a grain dryer as part of the farm business. When the dryer is on, I, (with my not too functional ears) can hear it inside my house. They work around it, with an awareness that it is very loud, but no awareness that they will have a hearing loss in the future from this equipment. It is very hard to get away from the sounds we have created in our world. There's no doubt that it makes life more difficult for us. There is a second whammy to this excess of this sound because we take too much sound for granted. We know that the human brain spends an enormous amount of time sorting out noises to which it must listen, and noises to which it need not listen. When Reid was little we did auditory training for things like washing machines so that he would learn what they were but not listen to them. When you're doing laundry, you listen to the washing machine to tell what cycle it is in, so you can go and move the laundry. If you don't want to move the laundry then you can do something else and be terribly busy and not hear it, as your choice. These are the choices that you have about hearing. To hear but not listen, to hear and listen, to not hear. Awful Noisy Kids on Awful Noisy Desks and ChairsThinking about the techniques and the technology to maximize a hearing environment, the cacaphony of the average classroom is outrageous. When I was teaching music in an average classroom, the chair noises of the metal chairs on the floor was awe-inspiring. I could never quite make up my mind whether it was completely deliberate by those charming little kids or whether they were completely unaware of the noise they were making, just sitting, or standing up. A lot of the improvements that could be made in classrooms begins with spending much more money in the acoustic considerations of classroom furniture. A cheaper compromise is to cut one hole in a tennis ball, and put the tennis balls on every desk leg, and chair leg in the class. To do this throughout the school system will need a much bigger tennis ball industry. Why is classroom furniture so noisy? Easy to clean, and cheap to build, and little or no consideration for making more noise. My son had a "flying carpet" supplied by a budget to modify classrooms for handicapped students, which went up the grades with him at school. Some of his teachers were very concerned about making the best auditory environment for him in the classroom using sound baffles, curtains, rugs. The teachers and principal feared someone would object to the rug, on the basis of allergies, until teachers actually had a rug on the hard floor, and better sound in a classroom. When Reid went to a rotary schedule (moving from class to class), his rug was eagerly absorbed into desirable classroom equipment, and disappeared. Portable classrooms have a lot of extra equipment in a small place, air conditioner and or heater and a lower ceiling than in a regular classroom. Usually portables have acoustic tile on the ceiling, and rugs on the floor to help with the noise. Classrooms in the school building cannot be evaluated as a group, there are good classrooms and bad classrooms for odd reasons, plus the equipment in use which may have fans. Sitting next to any equipment which produces air stream can wipe out hearing aids. is a group of parents who have decided to petition the White House to do something about the terrible state of noise in classrooms, building better classrooms, using the skills of a noise scientist in the planning and development for a better standard classroom. The petition is not up on the web yet, but you can go to their website and pre-sign for the petition, and they'll get back to you. They hope for millions of names on the petition. So do I. From the point of view of the parent who spent $5000 on hearing aids, it is annoying to have the child go to school and still hear nothing because of the ambient noise of kids, class and room. A cheat at best. Most children with hearing problems need to move much closer to the sound of the teacher's voice, or whoever is talking, or answering a question. Preferred Seating?Some schools have a plan called preferred seating for hard of hearing students, and it is a nice idea for the 5 minutes a day when the teacher stands still in the preferred teaching position. For the rest of the time the teacher moves around the room. Hopefully every child with hearing problems will have an overhead projector replacing the blackboard, because it makes life easier, the child can speechread, and does not have large periods of time when the teacher's back is turned to write on the board. The provision of an overhead projector is more important classroom support than preferred seating. Due to the earshot limitations of hearing aids, all hard of hearing children need FM's, preferably Microlinks which are discrete, and the teachers must learn to use the FM's efficiently by repeating the answers. So we now have an answer to the problems of hearing at school, in the acoustic nightmares which are the standard classroom. $7000 in equipment per hard of hearing student. Perhaps the school furniture makers could improve their "amplifying" desks for less. Perhaps the architects could think about the noise of ventilation systems. Perhaps...
-PAM Candlish May 1, 2002 |
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