Identification of Acoustic Comfort in Classroom of Gedung Kuliah Bersama V of Bengkulu University

Abstract

Classroom is a place for a group of people to study and improve their knowledge. To make learning activities becomes more effective, a classroom is expected to have comfort in terms of thermal, lighting, ventilation, and acoustic. This study focused only on the acoustic comfort of the classrooms at Gedung Kuliah Bersama V (GB V), University of Bengkulu (UNIB). Acoustic condition in the classroom has a crucial role for student concentration that affect to student’s achievement. Reverberation time (RT), initial time delay gap (ITDG), and the possibility of echo phenomenon in the classroom will be identified in this study as the acoustic parameters. Ecotect v5.5 software is being used to simulate three types of a classroom that represent classroom types at GB V. This simulation is used to identify RT, ITDG, and echo occurs in the classroom. Results of this study showed that ITDG values of these three classrooms had met the standard the classroom that used for conversation, which is under 20 m/s. Echo phenomenon is also relatively not seen in the simulation. It means that these three classrooms were also comfortable enough in terms of acoustic. However, the RT values in the three rooms still have not reached the optimum condition, 1.40 m/s for RK 2.02, which is higher than standard and lower than standard for the first room and 0.23 m/s and 0.10 m/s for the second and third room. So thus, some design recommendations are needed to get an optimum RT value.