A Survey on Perceived Indoor Acoustic Quality by Workers from Home during COVID-19 Lockdown in Italy

Abstract

From March 2020, Italians experienced lockdown due to COVID-19 pandemic. People had to share common living spaces with family members for an extended period converting their home into workplaces. This resulted in changes to everyday life noises with implications in terms of perception of indoor acoustic quality. An online survey was designed and distributed to Italian residents to assess how they perceived the indoor quality of domestic spaces when working from home. A total of 330 questionnaires were collected and analyzed. The paper reports the results of the analyses carried out, focusing on the acoustic quality in home spaces and the satisfaction of the respondents, including an analysis of the housing context. Most respondents attach great importance to the acoustic aspects in judging the quality of the living environment and believe that the acoustic quality can improve the performance of their work. The comparison between pre-lockdown and lockdown periods shows that noises inside the building prevail over those coming from the outside and annoyance is mainly due to noise from shared spaces. The results of this study highlighted how the COVID-19 lockdown was a unique opportunity to draw attention to the importance of the indoor acoustic quality.