Considering Classroom Soundscapes for Young Students

The sound environment of a classroom can significantly impact the experience of students, particularly for young learners. Yet most research on primary school classroom acoustics has focused solely on removing all sound, even though some sounds may be beneficial to young students’ experience. In this interview, we talk to Chiara Visentin (University of Ferrara) about her research into the soundscape of primary school classrooms.

Associated paper: Chiara Visentin, Simone Torresin, Matteo Pellegatti, and Nicola Prodi. “Indoor soundscape in primary school classrooms." The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 154, 1813 (2023); https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0020833.

Read more from The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA).
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Music Credit: Min 2019 by minwbu from Pixabay. https://pixabay.com/?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=music&utm_content=1022

Transcript

Kat Setzer  00:06

Welcome to Across Acoustics, the official podcast of the Acoustical Society of America's publications office. On this podcast, we will highlight research from our four publications. I'm your host, Kat Setzer, editorial associate for the ASA.

Kat Setzer  00:25

Today I'm talking with Chiara Visentin about her article, "Indoor soundscape in primary school classrooms," which published recently in JASA and is part of the Special Issue on Advances in Soundscape: Emerging Trends and Challenges in Research and Practice. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me today, Chiara, how are you?

Chiara Visentin  00:41

I'm doing fine. Thank you very much for the invitation. 

Kat Setzer  00:44

First, just tell us a bit about your research background.

Chiara Visentin  00:48

I'm currently a research fellow at the University of Ferrara in Italy. My research line covers the indoor soundscape, the acoustic comfort of these spaces and the interactions and cross effects between different domains of the indoor environmental quality on the occupants' perception. I took my PhD in Engineering Sciences at University of Ferrara, where I worked for several years as a postdoc, and afterwards I worked as a senior researcher at Eurac Research. During these years, I focused on room acoustics, and on the effects of the indoor sound environment on the occupants, and with specific reference to their comfort, performance and cognitive effort while doing a task. One of my key focuses was the acoustic design of learning spaces. And this is because students, and young students in particular, are among the most vulnerable categories to the effects of challenging listening conditions. And I believe that there is still research and work that we can do for creating acoustic conditions supporting the students' learning, social, and emotional development during their time at school. 

Kat Setzer  02:11

Yeah, totally, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, if you've ever walked into a school and how loud they are, and crazy they are, I can imagine you... it's very important to help reduce the effects of that on kids' learning. So what makes up the environmental quality of the space? 

Chiara Visentin  02:27

So, the indoor environmental quality is made up by four main aspects: visual, thermal, acoustic, and air quality. And all these aspects together concur in determining the human response to an indoor environment. So as a matter of fact, we don't perceive the world around us as a sum of independent stimuli, but our perception is inherently multimodal. So it means that when we enter an indoor space, when we enter a room, the impression that we have, the perception, is determined by the combination of several sensory stimuli that are experienced simultaneously or at the same time. Oftentimes, there is specific quality of the indoor environment that sort of stands out and influences the most the occupant's satisfaction or annoyance. And, for instance, this is the case of the classrooms in primary schools, as the students report that the aspect  that mostly play a role in the perception, in the comfort of the classroom environment is the acoustic quality and specifically the background noise inside of the classroom.

Chiara Visentin  02:27

Okay. What's known about classroom acoustical environments up until now, and how does thinking about the classroom acoustical environment as a soundscape differ from previous thinking about classroom acoustics?

Chiara Visentin  03:46

There are numerous studies on the effects of background noise and reverberation on students' performance and comfort in classrooms that have been conducted since the middle of the 20th century. So definitely the interest in classroom acoustics isn't something recent, but all these studies usually adopted the viewpoint of reducing the background noise in the classroom as much as possible. So every sound in the classroom is considered as something unwanted and stressful for both students and teachers. And recently, there is a complementary viewpoint that is emerging, which is based on the studies on the indoor soundscape of residential buildings and offices. And the concept of soundscape of an outdoor or an indoor space refers to how the sound environment is perceived by the occupants while they're doing a task. So the focus is no longer, or not only on physical measurements, but the focus shifts towards the human perception. And when talking about classroom acoustics, adopting these, like, new viewpoints means that we can manage and design the sound stimuli in order to elicit a positive school climate. And the idea is to design a supportive learning environment. not only by removing all the environmental stressors, but also by pursuing in a proactive way the psychological, cognitive, social well-being of the students.

Kat Setzer  05:36

Okay, yeah, that sounds great. So what research has been done to apply the soundscape concept to indoor learning environments?

Chiara Visentin  05:44

There are only a few studies using the soundscape approach in educational buildings, and they focused on libraries, classrooms, and laboratories of high schools and universities. So they focus on students older than 14 years. There are no studies adopting the soundscape concept with reference to younger students, like primary school students. And this is quite surprising, given the importance of the acoustic environment of learning spaces for young children compared to older students, as young children are still developing their cognitive and linguistic skills. This is not to say that there are no studies on the perception that primary school students have of their classrooms, but the studies, the existing studies, focus on the dimension of annoyance, and the negative effects of exposure to noise. On the contrary, adopting the soundscape approach, we want to assess how children negatively, but also positively respond to the sound environment of the classroom.

Kat Setzer  06:57

Okay, so you're looking not just that noise equals bad, but there are sounds that might improve their experience or ways to change the noise to improve their experience and that kind of thing.

Chiara Visentin  07:09

Yeah, that's it.

Kat Setzer  07:11

So you kind of touched on this a bit, but how does judging a soundscape based on a child's perspective differ from judging based on an adult's perspective?

Chiara Visentin  07:20

So soundscape studies have been, most of them, performed with adults, and so the dimensions of soundscape perception have been developed only with reference to adult listeners, but when we talk about perceptual patterns, there are differences between adults and children as these patterns change following the developmental stages. For example, from a physiological point of view, there are differences in how children and adults respond to sounds at high frequencies. And from a psychological point of view, children have less experience and awareness of the sound environments than adults. And also, they might have more difficulty than adults in communicating about sound stimuli. And we also know that whereas adults respond to the sound environment according to two main dimensions, that are perceived pleasantness and arousal, children tend to describe emotions, mainly in terms of pleasantness. And the last aspect to take into account is the fact that children have limited vocabulary to support the reporting, so when we ask them about their perception of the sound environment, it's crucial to use concepts and dimensions that match as much as possible their limited vocabulary.

Kat Setzer  08:47

Okay, yeah, that all makes sense, and it's a lot to kind of take into consideration. So what were the goals of this study?

Chiara Visentin  08:54

Okay, this was a pilot study, and we had three goals in mind. The first one was to investigate how primary school children perceive the sound environment of their classrooms, by adopting the concepts, the methodologies, and the perceptual dimensions typical of soundscape studies. And the second goal was to investigate the relationship between the students' perception of the classroom sound environment and the acoustic parameters of this indoor space. And finally, we wanted to explore the characteristics of the ideal soundscape. So we wanted to understand what are the sounds that the children would like to hear in their optimal sound channel.

Kat Setzer  09:41

Okay, got it. You kind of talked a little bit about how kids have a limited vocabulary to discuss their perceptions. You used questionnaires to get information about students' feelings regarding the classroom soundscape. Can you tell us about those questionnaires?

Chiara Visentin  09:55

Yeah, we adopted a pictorial scale to assess classroom soundscape, and this choice was based on previous studies with young children indicating that non-verbal rating systems  can be useful to overcome the children's limited vocabulary. So we use this pictorial scale that uses facial expressions or body reactions to represent in a clear, visual manner the emotions elicited by the sound stimuli, for instance, the concept of arousal in our study. And the whole questionnaire consisted of four sections. The first one assessed the demographic information. And the second one focused on the affective reactions of the children to the sound environment of the classroom, with both open and closed windows. And the third section assessed the frequency of occurrence and the pleasantness of specific sound sources in the classroom. And finally, the last section referred to the ideal soundscape in the clasroom.

Kat Setzer  11:03

Interesting. That sounds like such a fun way to set up a questionnaire, as far as the pictures go. So you assessed a few different classrooms and schools. Can you tell us about the different settings? 

Chiara Visentin  11:14

Yeah, we had three primary schools in the study. All of them were located in Italy. They belong to different urban contexts, so one of the schools was in the historic city center, the other one was in the modern city, and the last one was in the outskirts. So there were quite large differences in the outdoor sound environments, for instance, the presence of traffic noise, or the presence of anthropogenic sounds. And also, within each school, we assessed classrooms located in different areas of the school buildings. So we had classrooms, on different floors, and with different orientations.

Kat Setzer  11:59

Okay, very cool. So let's talk about some of the results. How did open versus closed windows end up affecting the soundscape?

Chiara Visentin  12:06

We asked the student to report on their perception of the sound environment in two conditions, with closed and open windows. That's because all the schools participating in our experiment were naturally ventilated buildings, so opening the window was the only means that students and teachers have to ensure a proper indoor air quality. And this simple act of opening the windows, changes the sound environment of the classroom, leading the students to greater exposure to external sound sources, and so it affects the indoor soundscape. We found that when windows are open, the perceived loudness increases for all the classrooms. That was expected, of course, but we also found the differences in the perception of the pleasantness dimension, which mainly depends on the urban context of the school, so being located in areas more or less exposed to traffic noise. Specifically, students in classrooms with an outdoor environment more characterized by traffic noise experienced a decrease in pleasantness when opening the windows. On the contrary, the same pleasantness, or an increased pleasantness is reported during natural ventilation in classrooms that are located in less exposed areas, for instance, classrooms facing natural outdoor setting.

Kat Setzer  13:36

Okay, yeah, that makes sense. I mean, listening to ambulances or traffic, like you said, would not be nearly as pleasant sounding as just having, you know, wind and animals and such. Okay. So, what factors did you find affected the children's perception of pleasantness and arousal in the classroom?

Chiara Visentin  13:57

Concerning pleasantness, the results of our study confirm that perceived pleasantness decreases when the overall sound level increases. And once again, this was expected, but we also found that the rating of pleasantness was positively related to the frequency of occurence of children's voices in nearby classrooms. In other words, we found that classrooms eliciting a positive perceptual outcome are quiet, but not completely silent spaces, as some sounds generated by other children in the school should still be, let's say, audible. Concerning arousal, we found that it increases when the students are exposed to specific sound sources external to the classroom, such as the sirens or voices from other students. And these are sound sources that generate either salient sounds, for instance intelligible words, or sounds that deviated from the main auditory context. So these are all sounds with a stronger attentional capturing potential, and we know that the young children are especially vulnerable to this type of distraction because they are still developing their attention skills.

Kat Setzer  15:18

So you discuss the ideal soundscape for the students. What are the features of this type of soundscape? Why is it important to consider?

Chiara Visentin  15:25

We found that nature-related sounds were highly preferred by the students, closely followed by music, whereas anthropogenic sounds, like the traffic, were the least preferred. And so we found that when directly asked, the children express the preference for some stimuli that are able to promote calmness and restoration in the classroom. And we know from other studies, both in the lab and in field, that exposure to natural sounds has a positive effect, on comfort, on learning, and it also has a restorative effect on memory and attention. So once again, the children in our study indicated that the ideal sound environment of the classroom is not completely silent. And this finding reinforces the idea that the current approach, based only on noise control, does not always define a learning sound environment of high quality.

Kat Setzer  16:27

That is so interesting. What were your major takeaways about current classroom soundscapes?

Chiara Visentin  16:31

The results of this pilot study indicate that children perceive to be exposed to unpleasant sounds when they are in school. And also the sounds that they perceive to occur more frequently in the classroom are those generated by the children themselves, so voices and movements. And it seems like there is a greater attention on the sounds generated inside of the classroom compared to sounds generated outside, so other spaces within the school or the outdoors. And we also found evidences of an interaction between the urban context of the school and the children's perceived pleasantness. And this interaction becomes apparent each time the windows are open to ensure ventilation. And in perspective, this finding has implications for the selection of the best ventilation strategy to be adopted in each classroom, depending on its location in the school building.

Kat Setzer  17:33

Okay, interesting. Any thoughts on how you'd like to expand on this research in the future?

Chiara Visentin  17:38

Yeah, I have plenty of ideas. Definitely, the next step will be to develop a classroom indoor soundscape model that is tailored to primary school students, both in the graphical form and in the concepts and the dimensions, the perceptual dimensions that are targeted. Also, future research on this topic, so in the soundscape approach to learning spaces, should consider the always increasing presence of children with special hearing and communication needs in mainstream classrooms, because we know the students with special educational needs are differentially affected by nonadequate classroom acoustic conditions. So it's fundamental, it's crucial to broaden the assessment of the classroom soundscape to all the students learning in the classroom if we want to have the final aim to design a classroom acoustic environments that could work for all of them. 

Kat Setzer  18:43

Okay. It's really interesting to consider how a young child's perception of the sound in the space might differ from what an older student or an adult might perceive, as well as how improving a learning environment might not just mean getting rid of all noise but thinking of ways to increase pleasantness or calmness in the classroom setting. Thank you again for taking the time to speak with me and I wish the best of luck to you on your future research.

Chiara Visentin  19:05

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Kat Setzer  19:07

You're welcome. 

Kat Setzer  19:10

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