Occupant-centric acoustical frameworks: Guiding principles to manage background sound

Abstract

The success of new conceptual frameworks, which center the needs and expectations of occupants in the built environment, is predicated on the development of guiding principles describing the interactions and integration of different acoustical solutions. By way of example, speech privacy is the assessment of the degree of unintelligibility of speech between a talker and a listener. The evaluation is an equal function of the difference in level of the signal between the source and receiver locations, and the ambient acoustic conditions at the receiver. While there is ample literature describing strategies for employing acoustical solutions to mitigate the transmission of sound and absorb excess acoustic energy, there are few, if any, that offer guidance as to the interference of noise (emitted from critical building systems) on masking sound (emitted from a sound masking system) measurement. The proposed conceptual framework relies on acoustical theory to derive new mathematical relationships for effective implementation of sound masking systems. The conditions can enable optimization of the complex relationships implicating building-related systems' performance and efficiencies, speech privacy and acoustical comfort.