Abstract
ISO 3382-3 is globally used to determine the room acoustic conditions of open-plan offices using in situ measurements. The key outcomes of the standard are three single-number quantities: distraction distance, rD, A-weighted sound pressure level of speech, Lp,A,S,4m, and spatial decay rate of speech, D2,S. Quantities Lp,A,S,4m and D2,S describe the attenuation properties of the office due to room and furniture absorption and geometry. Our purpose is to introduce a new single-number quantity, comfort distance rC, which integrates the quantities Lp,A,S,4m and D2,S. It describes the distance from an omnidirectional loudspeaker where the A-weighted sound pressure level of normal speech falls below 45 dB. The study explains why the comfort criterion level is set to 45 dB, explores the comfort distances in 185 offices reported in previous studies. Based on published data, the rC values lie typically within 3 m (strong attenuation) and 30 m (weak attenuation). Based on this data, a classification scheme was proposed. The new quantity could benefit the revised version of ISO 3382-3.
Highlights
Office noise and lack of speech privacy are among the environmental factors causing the largest dissatisfaction in open-plan offices [1]
The disturbance caused by remote speech can be reduced by simultaneous application of sound absorbers, blocking of sound propagation, and electroacoustic sound masking [4]
The purpose of our study is to present the scientific basis of comfort distance to better introduce it as a new single-number quantities (SNQs) in the revised version of ISO 3382-3 [6,16]
Summary
Office noise and lack of speech privacy are among the environmental factors causing the largest dissatisfaction in open-plan offices [1]. One of the main reasons for this might be that work performance in concentration-demanding tasks has been found to improve with reducing intelligibility of irrelevant speech [2]. This is supported by the finding that disturbance due to noise was lower in offices having lower speech intelligibility [3]. Behavioral means can significantly affect the amount of irrelevant speech in offices, such as reducing speech effort, using high-quality headsets during phone meetings, or preferably to move to another room during such calls. Room acoustic treatment can reduce office noise. The potential of solving noise problems in offices with room acoustic means is large
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