Use of smartphones for introductory acoustics education

Abstract

In order to propose an effective method using smartphones (including tablets) for acoustics education in introductory courses for architectural and environmental acoustics for architectural studies, the authors have examined some applications which work on smartphones. As the first step applications measuring sound level and spectrum at reasonable prices are chosen and their precisions have been verified. Results showed that the most iOS devices have somewhat reasonable precision, e.g., for SPL measurement it is similar to Class 2 sound level meter, though some Android devices give lower precision. Then the authors introduced these tools to students and encouraged them to use these tools to produce a noise map (with dB(A) only and with both dB(A) and sound spectra). Even though these are only simple tools, they allow students to understand the relationship between their sensation and physical values. As further studies, the authors also tried to use some more applications which enable students to measure more advanced physical values, such as Band Levels, Leq, Impulse Responses, Reverberation Times etc. Some examples of the measurement results of them are also presented.