Ejercicio 3 · Gapped text: por qué bajamos la voz

Why we lower our voices in old buildings

Walk into a cathedral, a museum or an old library and something happens to the way you speak. Most people drop their volume within a few steps of the door, often before they have seen anyone else inside. (1)

Sebastian Krol, who studies acoustics at a Belgian university, began looking at this after recording tourists in a church in Ghent. He assumed that visitors were reacting to the long reverberation, the way a voice hangs in a large stone space, and that the quieter behaviour would fade as people got used to it. (2) The tourists who stayed longest were the quietest of all.

His team then repeated the recordings in a modern building with almost identical reverberation, a university sports hall. Voices there stayed loud. (3) Something about the room was telling people how to behave, and it was not simply the echo.

Krol suspects that the cue is a combination of light, temperature, ceiling height and the behaviour of the first person through the door. In one experiment, a single confederate speaking normally was enough to raise the volume of everyone who entered afterwards. (4) People cannot usually explain why they were whispering, and many deny that they were.

(5) Some researchers argue that the effect is simply learned: we are taught as children to be quiet in churches, and we obey the label on the building rather than the room. Krol accepts that this explains a good deal, but not why the same drop appears in buildings that visitors cannot identify at all. (6)