Objective Assessment of Binaural Benefit from Acoustical Treatment in Real Primary School Classrooms

Providing students with an adequate acoustic environment is crucial for ensuring speech intelligibility in primary school classrooms. Two main approaches to control acoustics in educational facilities consist of reducing background noise and late reverberation. Prediction models for speech intelligibility have been developed and implemented to evaluate the effects of these approaches. In this study, two versions of the Binaural Speech Intelligibility Model (BSIM) were used to predict speech intelligibility in realistic spatial configurations of speakers and listeners, considering binaural aspects. Both versions shared the same binaural processing and speech intelligibility backend processes but differed in the pre-processing of the speech signal. An Italian primary school classroom was characterized in terms of acoustics before (reverberation, T20 = 1.6 ± 0.1 s) and after (T20 = 0.6 ± 0.1 s) an acoustical treatment to compare BSIM predictions to well-established room acoustic measures. With shorter reverberation time, speech clarity and definition improved, as well as speech recognition thresholds (SRTs) (by up to ~6 dB), particularly when the noise source was close to the receiver and an energetic masker was present. Conversely, longer reverberation times resulted (i) in poorer SRTs (by ~11 dB on average) and (ii) in an almost non-existent spatial release from masking at an angle (SRM).