“Acoustics for learning environments across physical and virtual realities” Chaired by Jenina Fels & Arianna Astolfi Forum Acousticum 2027 held in Gratz, Austria, this September was a certified “Green Meeting” Session overview part 1 A great mix of topics from acoustic modelling, predicting how learning spaces might sound and be perceived, listening effort and comfort, […]
Education
BNAM 2026 in Gothenburg Sweden – a meeting place for the future of acoustics
Baltic Nordic Acoustic Meeting (BNAM) In May 2026, Gothenburg hosted the Baltic Nordic Acoustic Meeting (BNAM), one of the most important conferences on acoustics in the Nordic and Baltic regions. The event took place on 4–6 May at Chalmers University of Technology and brought together researchers, consultants, companies and students from across the region. BNAM […]
Acoustical Capacity for Group Work in University Classrooms
At BNAM 2026 – “Room Acoustics – Offices, Hospitals, Schools, Restaurants” Oliver Bonde’s presentation “Acoustical Capacity for Group Work in University Classrooms” was first up in the session named “Room Acoustics – Offices, Hospitals, School, Restaurants”, chaired by Peter Svensson and Ayca Sentop Dumen. Background and based on Rindel’s eating establishments As Oliver explained, the […]
Quiet Enough to Think, Open Enough to Thrive
A qualitative study of sound environments in traditional and open classroom settings This Swedish qualitative study explores how students, teachers, and school staff at Gantofta School experience the sound environment in two contrasting learning settings: a traditional classroom (Learning space typology – Type A/B, Fig.1) and an open, flexible learning environment known as Amfi (Lst […]
The many impacts of inadequate acoustic environments on neurodivergent and noise sensitive people.
Guest post by Carmen Rosas-Pérez (a PhD student at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh (UK)). Overview This post summarises the research done for my PhD Thesis ‘Disabling Acoustics: Impact of daily-life acoustic environments on neurodivergent, auraldivergent and noise sensitive people’ carried at Heriot-Watt University (UK) and funded by a James Watt scholarship. As a neurodivergent acoustic engineer […]
The importance of C50 for speech communication and classroom group activities
This study investigates the acoustic conditions of 26 primary school classrooms during lessons. There was a specific focus on how classroom activity type, student age, and room acoustics shape both speech levels and activity noise. Using Gaussian Mixture Models, the researchers separated teacher and student speech from non-speech activity noise across 93 homogeneous activity periods. […]
Acoustic and indoor air quality conditions on sensory and cognitive responses of university students
In this guest post, Matteo Pellegrini post doc researcher at University of Ferrara shares his latest research paper looking into students sensory and cognitive responses to their university acoustic and indoor air quality conditions. Matteo Pellegrini Post doc researcher University of Ferrara, Italy Study introduction Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) describes the overall quality of an […]
The effect of a reduced reverberation time on students and their performance in higher education classrooms: a between-groups experiment
Research about the effect of reverberation time reduction on students and their performance was carried out by Henk W. Brink. Study Overview This study explored an alteration of the classrooms’ reverberation time (RT). This lead to acoustic conditions meeting quality class A of Dutch guidelines, resulting in a positive effect on students’ perceptions and performance. […]
What does a good classroom sound like to a child? – The SOUNDkids project
A guest post by Chiara Visentin, a researcher at the University of Ferrara, Italy Moving beyond noise control towards a child-centred approach to classroom soundscapes When we think about good classroom acoustics, we often think about reducing noise, controlling reverberation and making the teacher’s voice easier to understand. All these aspects are essential. But are they […]
Remodelling of open plan De Werkplaats primary school – acoustic design and operational challenges – School case study 4
Introduction De Werkplaats in Bilthoven, (NL) inspired by Kees Boeke’s educational philosophy, was designed as a progressive primary school with open learning environments. The aim: to stimulate collaboration, autonomy and inclusivity. In practice, however, the open spaces proved to pose considerable acoustic and organisational challenges. This led to a large-scale remodel, during which objective and […]
