Room Acoustics

For my project, I am interested in room acoustics. The question that I want to answer is, "how loud do I need to speak for someone to hear me over other distractions in the room?" This is important to me because my roommate and I will still always talk when the television is on or when the fan is blowing, but we always need to talk louder so that we can hear one another. This is especially interesting because sometimes we will have more than one appliance or distraction in the room. For example, we may have the television on, the fan on, and the blow dryer on all at the same time. I want to measure how loud our voices are without any appliances on, how loud each appliance is and then how loud we need to talk to hear over that. I want to do different measurements such as when we have just one appliance on and when we have two appliances being used. I can then measure the difference in the loudness of our voices when speaking. I plan to use our acoustics book, journal articles, and other various credible website sources when doing research for this project.

Outline

I.) Introduction

a.) introduce topic

b.) introduce question that I am addressing

c.) state reason why this is relavent to me

II.) Sound Waves

a.) discuss how sound waves reach the brain

b.) discuss how we perceive sounds

III.) Backround Noise

a.) describe objects I am using as backround noise

b.) describe humans' ability to hear with backround noise present

IV.) Voice Levels

a.) describe normal voice levels

b.) describe voice levels used in other various places

V.) Masking

a.) what is masking?

b.) John Cage's "4 Minutes, 33 Seconds"

VI.) Experimental Results

a.) explain the methods I used

b.) explain how I collected data

VII.) Results

a.) explain the results I found

b.) explain why this is significant to me

VIII.) Conclusion