A one-school year longitudinal study of secondary school teachers' voice parameters and the influence of classroom acoustics

Recent literature reports that a large percentage of teachers complain that teaching has an adverse effect on their voice status. Thus, more needs to be done to study their vocal behavior. The objective of this longitudinal study was twofold: to determine changes in the voice use of teachers over a school year, and to study the relationships between voice use and classroom acoustic parameters. Thirty-one teachers from two secondary schools in Turin (Italy) were involved at the beginning of the 2014–2015 school year, and 22 of them also participated at the end of the same school year. The results show that teachers adjust their voices with noise and reverberation. A minimum value of the sound pressure level of voice (SPL) was found at a mid-frequency reverberation time of 0.8 s in both periods. Moreover, the teachers who worked in the worst classroom acoustic conditions showed an increase of 2.3 dB in the mean SPL and a decrease of 10% in the voicing time percentage at the end of the school year. A predictive model that can be used to estimate the mean SPL from the background noise level and the reverberation time, based on collected data, is here proposed.