Students investigate acoustics in Oldenburg restaurants

Ten out of 13 restaurants tested in Oldenburg have good to very good room acoustics: this is the initial result of a study conducted by physics students at the University of Oldenburg. Their ongoing investigation will be presented at the 40th Annual German Conference on Acoustics, which is currently being held at the university alongside the 17th Annual Conference of the German Society for Audiology. "As people with normal hearing, we normally have no difficulty communicating in a restaurant. But with increasing age and hearing loss, this becomes more and more difficult and a serious problem," explains physicist and physician Prof Dr Dr Birger Kollmeier, who heads the "Hearing4all" Cluster of Excellence at the university.

The specially trained acoustics assessors visited the 13 Oldenburg restaurants in the run-up to the conference and evaluated their acoustics based on the background noise, the intelligibility of their own conversation and the overall acoustics. While the acoustics of ten restaurants made a good to very good overall impression, two restaurants failed completely. "Poor restaurant acoustics are reverberant. Conversation in larger groups is therefore hardly possible and excludes many people with hearing problems," says Kollmeier.

The Oldenburg students' study forms the basis for further research: It is to be supplemented and automated by a hearing model-based computer programme to measure speech intelligibility and serve to improve room acoustics.