FAA Office of Aerospace Medicine
Civil Aerospace Medical Institute

Report No: DOT/FAA/AM-79/5

Title and Subtitle: Acoustic signals for emergency evacuation

Report Date: January 1979

Authors: Tobias JV, Kidd GD Jr

Abstract: Previous studies of binaural hearing suggested that speech sounds are less resistant to masking than are nonspeech sounds; experiments demonstrated that, when the nonspeech sounds are given a message to convey, they act more like speech. Earlier research showed that when subjects are deprived of vision, their walking behavior can be changed by presenting them with binaurally localizable signals, and so tests were run using speech recordings at the exits of the FAA Civil Aeromedical Institute's emergency evacuation simulator. The voices called out, Exit here, This way, and This way out, and people who had the opportunity to listen to them in an evacuation situation in which the illumination level was quite low and the subjects' vision was further obscured as if by smoke or dust performed better than people who did not hear the sounds.

Key Words: Emergency evacuation, Speech communication, Masking, Auditory Localization, Binaural hearing

No. of Pages: 23