• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.33 no.5
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• pp.316-325
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• 2014

The basic unit of school is a classroom and the aural environment of the classrooms is essential factor for education purposes. Therefore, many efforts have been undertaken for enhancing the acoustical performance of the classrooms in many countries. As a result, acoustic criteria including reverberation time and background noise level have been established in US and UK for school classrooms depending on the usage and size of the rooms. However, in Korea, there has been little researches concerning the room acoustical investigations of the classrooms. The present study investigates the current situation of the aural environment of the 15 classrooms in Korea including elementary, middle and high schools. The acoustic criteria measured include RT, $D_{50}$, STI, SNR and background noise level. As the results, it was found that the background noise levels of the schools adjacent to roads exceed the US and UK standard of 35 dB(A). Also, most schools have so low SNR that they may be interfered by noise, which may affect speech transmission. It was also revealed that some schools have longer RT than the US standard of 0.6 s, but they all have high speech intelligibility.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.29 no.7
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• pp.458-467
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• 2010

In this paper, a new audio reproduction system was developed in which the cross-talk signals would be reasonably cancelled at an arbitrary listener position. To adaptively remove the cross-talk signals according to the listener's position, a method of tracking the listener position was employed. This was achieved using the two microphones, where the listener direction was estimated using the time-delay between the two signals from the two microphones, respectively. Moreover, room reverberation effects were taken into consideration where linear prediction analysis was involved. To remove the cross-talk signals at the left-and right-ears, the paths between the sources and the ears were represented using the KEMAR head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) which were measured from the artificial dummy head. To evaluate the usefulness of the proposed listener tracking system, the performance of cross-talk cancellation was evaluated at the estimated listener positions. The performance was evaluated in terms of the channel separation ration (CSR), a -10 dB of CSR was experimentally achieved although the listener positions were more or less deviated. A real-time system was implemented using a floating-point digital signal processor (DSP). It was confirmed that the average errors of the listener direction was 5 degree and the subjects indicated that 80 % of the stimuli was perceived as the correct directions.

• Transactions of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering
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• v.14 no.7
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• pp.586-603
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• 2004

One of the subtle problems that make noise control difficult for engineers is “the invisibility of noise or sound.” The visual image of noise often helps to determine an appropriate means for noise control. There have been many attempts to fulfill this rather challenging objective. Theoretical or numerical means to visualize the sound field have been attempted and as a result, a great deal of progress has been accomplished, for example in the field of visualization of turbulent noise. However, most of the numerical methods are not quite ready to be applied practically to noise control issues. In the meantime, fast progress has made it possible instrumentally by using multiple microphones and fast signal processing systems, although these systems are not perfect but are useful. The state of the art system is recently available but still has many problematic issues : for example, how we can implement the visualized noise field. The constructed noise or sound picture always consists of bias and random errors, and consequently it is often difficult to determine the origin of the noise and the spatial shape of noise, as highlighted in the title. The first part of this paper introduces a brief history, which is associated with “sound visualization,” from Leonardo da Vinci's famous drawing on vortex street (Fig. 1) to modern acoustic holography and what has been accomplished by a line or surface array. The second part introduces the difficulties and the recent studies. These include de-Dopplerization and do-reverberation methods. The former is essential for visualizing a moving noise source, such as cars or trains. The latter relates to what produces noise in a room or closed space. Another mar issue associated this sound/noise visualization is whether or not Ivecan distinguish mutual dependence of noise in space : for example, we are asked to answer the question, “Can we see two birds singing or one bird with two beaks?"