Will the Sound Booth Go the Way of the Phone Booth?

I remember phone booths all over town while I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1990s, for example, there were more than two million phone booths in the United States according to Statista, an online data provider.

The concept of the telephone booth was patented in 1883, and, at that time, the phone booth was referred to as a “telephone cabinet.” Modern telephone booths were glass enclosures with folding doors that housed coin-operated phones, allowing people to make calls when they were out and about. With the emergence of cell phones, these physical booths to make phone calls became irrelevant. There are very few phone booths left these days– and seeing one always triggers nostalgia for many people.

Audiologists are professionals who have a close connection to booths and there is no doubt that most of us have spent a significant amount of time in them testing patients. In the early 1900s, when investigators like Cordia Bunch were beginning to develop methods to measure auditory thresholds, it was determined that, in order collect the most accurate data, the tests needed to be administered in a quiet environment.

Those of us who have worked to design clinics and/or expand hearing services to other locations in a practice understand that a clinic centers around the sound booths. These booths are costly, have a large footprint, and are often the limiting factor in how much patient capacity a clinic can have.

The need for large, physical, sound-attenuating enclosures, such as sound booths, will most likely decline in the near future as “boothless” audiometry technology continues to develop. The current applications for the use of boothless technology include audiometric screening and monitoring changes in hearing thresholds. Currently, boothless testing is used primarily for screening measures, the results of which are then used to refer patients for more precise testing in an audiology clinic, when indicated.

The challenges that have confronted boothless audiometry in the past have been the effects of background low-frequency noise interfering with obtaining a patient's true threshold. However, in recent years, investigators have employed innovative techniques (e.g., active noise reduction) to reduce ambient noise levels in headphones to levels equivalent to traditional sound booths.

Furthermore, automated audiometry techniques are rapidly being shown to be capable of, in many cases, providing test results that are equivalent to those obtained by a skilled clinician. It is noteworthy that there are already systems in the marketplace that incorporate automated audiometry using boothless technology.

There is no question that boothless technology currently offers clinicians the ability to more effectively and more conveniently engage with patients. In this issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Audiology, Chen and colleagues demonstrate how speech perception in patients with cochlear implants (CIs) can be assessed in a “virtual sound booth.” The goal of the study was to compare speech-perception performance using the direct audio input in the CI to that of a traditional sound booth. Without giving away the punchline, the results suggest that the conventional sound booth may be going the way of the phone box.

Publication History

Article published online:
09 August 2021