Lombard effect

The Lombard effect refers to a phenomenon in human speech communication. It describes the tendency of people to increase their speaking volume when speaking in a noisy environment or when they have difficulty being heard.

The effect was named after the French phonetician Étienne-Jules Marey de Lombard, who first described the phenomenon in 1881. Lombard observed that people automatically raise their voices to rise above the noise and ensure that their messages are heard.

The Lombard effect not only occurs in humans, but has also been observed in other animals such as birds and whales. It is a natural reaction to improve the intelligibility of one's speech in noisy environments.

In today's world, the Lombard effect plays an important role in the development of speech recognition and speech processing technologies. By understanding this effect, these technologies can be better tuned to ambient noise for more accurate speech recognition and communication.