The Lombard Effect

First phones had a leaky bit of feedback called side tone, which meant that you could hear a tiny bit of your own voice coming out of the speaker. All landlines have side tone carefully designed into them, specifically to avoid bellowing in offices or in your front room. The real problem is that our mobiles are mobile and we could be speaking on a building site or in a library site. That demonstrates a well-known acoustic phenomenon called the Lombard effect discovered in 1909 by Etienne Lombard,. A French ossolaryngologist. He's a throat doctor. We automatically set our voices to the volume of the loudest sound we can hear - whether it's a