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310 CINEMATOGRAPHIC ANNUAL
ducted in a quiet open place have indicated that with average speakers and listeners the articulation in such a room will be about ninety-six per cent. This figure represents the highest attainable acoustic quality for speech reception in a room. A rating of one hundred per cent, that is perfect articulation, can never be attained. A few of the consonantal sounds are sometimes mistaken even under ideal hearing conditions. We are ordinarily unaware of this when we listen to speech because the connotation of the articulated words facilitates the correct interpretations of those words which are not heard distinctly. Even when the speech articulation is as low as seventy-five per cent the hearing will be regarded as acceptable. An articulation of ninety-six per cent is, for all practical purposes, about perfect, and therefore there seems to be no necessity for attempting to improve this limited ideal, although it could be done by altering slightly the pronunciation, or even emphasis, of some of the soft consonantal sounds.
The extension of the size of the room, the use of reflecting materials for the walls and ceiling, and the presence of disturbing noise will all tend to impair the acoustic quality of the room, and thus reduce the articulation below ninety-six per cent. In general, each of the four mentioned factors which affects the acoustics of the room will introduce a distortion or a disturbance which can be determined quantitatively. Thus, the resulting percentage articulation in any specified auditorium can be estimated by the following equation :
Percentage Articulation = 96 ki kr kn ks, (1)
where k! is the reduction factor owing to the inadequate loudness of the speech, kr the reduction or distortion factor owing to reverberation, k„ the reduction factor owing to noise, and ks the reduction factor owing to the shape of the room. The first three of these reduction factors are fairly well known from existing experimental data. The work of Fletcher has determined the effect of loudness upon speech reception, and my own work has determined the effects of noise and reverberation upon speech reception. The effects of loudness and noise were discussed in the lecture on ''Speech and Hearing". The interfering effect of reverberation upon the hearing of speech will be discussed later in this lecture. For the present, we wish to ascertain what is the average loudness of speech in a room of specified