A school might have a stellar faculty and engaging curriculum—but students won’t benefit if they can’t hear their teacher. The most common culprits: excessive background noise and levels of reverberation, both of which hinder speech intelligibility. Sometimes the solution is as simple as relocating the HVAC equipment. But the next line of defense is “softening” a room so that the sound waves don’t bounce off all the hard surfaces.
In public school classrooms, where cost and maintenance are priorities, “acoustic ceiling tiles give you the biggest bang for the buck,” says Michael Brown, principal of Santa Monica–based Newson Brown Acoustics. Products like Armstrong’s Total Acoustics ceiling panels, which absorb and block exterior sound, offer a high noise-reduction coefficient (NRC). They also take in all the sound frequencies, not just the short-wave high ones that contribute to speech intelligibility.
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