Acoustical Effects of Surgical and N95 Masks on Speech Perception in Open-Plan Offices

Wearing face masks provides some protection against infection from COVID-19. Face masks can also change how people communicate and subsequently affect speech signal quality. This study investigated how two common face mask types affect acoustic analysis of speech perception. Quantitative and qualitative assessments were carried out in terms of measuring the sound pressure levels and playing back to a group of people, respectively. The responses gauged proved that masks alter the speech signal with downstream effects on speech intelligibility of a speaker. Masks muffle speech sounds at higher frequencies and hence the acoustic effect of a speaker wearing a face mask is equivalent to the listener having a slight high frequency hearing loss. When asked on the perception of audibility, 83% of the participants were able to clearly hear the no mask audio clip, however, 41% of the participants thought it was moderately audible with the N95 and face shield masks. Due to no visual access, face masks act as communication barriers with 50% of the people finding to understand a person because they could not read their lips. Nevertheless, based on these findings it's reasonable to hypothesize that wearing a mask would attenuate speech spectra at similar frequency bands.