Improvement of the sound environment for supporting communication at nursery facilities: Approaches for changing room acoustics and users' minds

摘要

Nursery facilities in Japan have recently been experiencing problems with their sound environments, such as insufficient sound absorption and high volume of generated sound. We therefore examined some approaches to creating an acoustic environment that supports communication in the classroom. As a result of addressing room acoustics by installing materials with an average sound absorption coefficient of 0.25 or more in the classroom, both the impression of the sound and the teacher's reported ease in listening to children's voices when many sounds were generated was improved. To address users' minds, we conducted a workshop for 5- to 6-year-old children and their nursery teachers to make them conscious of the daily sound environment and to instruct them in how to identify pleasant sounds and to allow them to experience the corners of the room, treated with sound absorption materials. As a result, the children and preschool teachers came to understand that unnecessarily loud speech led to environmental noise, and that they could relax and enjoy sounds in spaces surrounded by sound absorption materials.