Research on Speech Changes Due
to Environmental Noise
Diana Cotoros, Ionel ¸
Serban, Corneliu Drug˘ a, and Anca Stanciu
Abstract People are tending to be more focused upon their own preoccupations and
unable to divide their attention to several stimuli around them. This phenomenon
increasingly occurs when they find themselves in a situation requiring to listen to
a lecture, a conference or a speech for a certain amount of time. There usually
occurs an environmental sound due to furniture creaking, people coughing or whispering, and even the audio tools may provide some unexpected noises, or some
construction site may work nearby, etc. The speaker has the tendency of changing
his way of speaking in order to instinctively challenge these environmental disturbances (Lombard’s effect). The paper is presenting some experiments done with the
participation of several subjects with different ages, meant to observe and analyze
the speech changes in various environmental disturbances in order to raise awareness
upon the stress induced by environmental noise in professions requiring speeches in
front of a large audience (actors, teachers, politicians, etc.).
1 Introduction
Modern life provides a setting for a regularly noisy environment of our daily activities
and communications, the result being, besides the well-known noise pollution shortcomings, some changes in the communication behavior that are meant to help human
beings to adjust to the environmental challenges. Some people in some professions
are more challenged than others, so people talking in front of a large audience are
more exposed than those whose jobs do not assume such kind of human interactions.
More than 100 years ago, the French otolaryngologist Etienne Lombard stumbled
upon an interesting effect occurred when people need to speak in a noisy environment,
while he was trying to study hearing loss and its simulation [1]. Since then, researchers
determined new ways of using Lombard’s findings and apply them in various domains
where speech takes place in noisy conditions [2, 3].
D. Cotoros (B) · I. ¸
Serban · C. Drug˘ a · A. Stanciu
University Transilvania of Brasov, Brasov, Romania
e-mail: dcotoros@unitbv.ro
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
N. Herisanu and V. Marinca (eds.), Acoustics and Vibration of Mechanical
Structures—AVMS 2019, Springer Proceedings in Physics 251,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54136-1_20
217
to Environmental Noise
Diana Cotoros, Ionel ¸
Serban, Corneliu Drug˘ a, and Anca Stanciu
Abstract People are tending to be more focused upon their own preoccupations and
unable to divide their attention to several stimuli around them. This phenomenon
increasingly occurs when they find themselves in a situation requiring to listen to
a lecture, a conference or a speech for a certain amount of time. There usually
occurs an environmental sound due to furniture creaking, people coughing or whispering, and even the audio tools may provide some unexpected noises, or some
construction site may work nearby, etc. The speaker has the tendency of changing
his way of speaking in order to instinctively challenge these environmental disturbances (Lombard’s effect). The paper is presenting some experiments done with the
participation of several subjects with different ages, meant to observe and analyze
the speech changes in various environmental disturbances in order to raise awareness
upon the stress induced by environmental noise in professions requiring speeches in
front of a large audience (actors, teachers, politicians, etc.).
1 Introduction
Modern life provides a setting for a regularly noisy environment of our daily activities
and communications, the result being, besides the well-known noise pollution shortcomings, some changes in the communication behavior that are meant to help human
beings to adjust to the environmental challenges. Some people in some professions
are more challenged than others, so people talking in front of a large audience are
more exposed than those whose jobs do not assume such kind of human interactions.
More than 100 years ago, the French otolaryngologist Etienne Lombard stumbled
upon an interesting effect occurred when people need to speak in a noisy environment,
while he was trying to study hearing loss and its simulation [1]. Since then, researchers
determined new ways of using Lombard’s findings and apply them in various domains
where speech takes place in noisy conditions [2, 3].
D. Cotoros (B) · I. ¸
Serban · C. Drug˘ a · A. Stanciu
University Transilvania of Brasov, Brasov, Romania
e-mail: dcotoros@unitbv.ro
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
N. Herisanu and V. Marinca (eds.), Acoustics and Vibration of Mechanical
Structures—AVMS 2019, Springer Proceedings in Physics 251,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54136-1_20
217