Survey Test Methods for Acoustic Measurements in Buildings

Abstract

A survey test method was developed for measuring the airborne and impact sound insulation and the noise from equipment in buildings. The method is based on manual scanning to obtain the average sound pressure level in a room and on the use of tabular reverberation time data. The uncertainty produced by manual scanning is quite small. The influence of the reverberation time table can also be kept small if a certain complexity of the table is taken as the limit of simplification. Furnished rooms, and several types of unfurnished room constructions are therefore treated separately. The basic principle of the CEN survey method was recently agreed upon by the working group responsible. Additional field measurements should be carried out with reference to ISO 140-4, –5 and –7 to obtain more reliable data on the accuracy in all cases of furnished and unfurnished rooms. If, with reference to the methods of ISO 140, the preliminary estimated uncertainty of single number quantities of ±2 dB proved to be correct, the CEN survey method would be a useful alternative for measurements and verification tests in the field. As to the measurement of noise from housing equipment, some open questions remain to be solved.