Subjective tests on listening difficulty of public address announcement in public spaces

摘要

As for safety in public spaces in large cities, it is important to provide the information clearly through a public address system. In such public spaces as railway stations, air terminals and shopping arcade, it is often caused that the announcement cannot be heard because of long reverberation and environmental noise caused by the lack of acoustical consideration. In order to improve the poor acoustical condition, authors have performed acoustical measurements in public spaces and subjective experiments in the simulated sound field. In this study, subjective tests on listening difficulty were performed by applying the 3-dimensional sound field simulation technique using the recorded environmental sounds including announcements through the public address system in real public spaces. The primary factor of the listening difficulty of the announcement was examined. In order to investigate the influence on the background of language which is his/her mother's tongue or not, the announcements not only in Japanese but also in English were used. From the experimental results, it is seemed that the listening difficulty is related to the surrounding noise level, the speech rate of announcements and the reverberation.