Measurements of Sound Propagation Between Mock-Up Workstations

This report presents the results of an extensive series of measurements of sound propagation between pairs of mock-up workstations. Inter-workstation propagation measurements were repeated for 104 variations of the workstation configuration to determine the effect of each of the major design variables. The measurements were made to aid in developing and validating a model of speech propagation between rectangular workstations in open plan offices. This work is one of the technical building blocks of the acoustical aspects of the COPE project (Cost-effective Open Plan Environments). The COPE project will consider the optimisation of the complete open office indoor environment. The report includes detailed measurements of inter-workstation sound attenuations in 1/3 octave frequency bands. However, the results are presented in terms of the single number Speech Intelligibility Index (SII) rating that is a good indicator of the expected speech privacy of each configuration. (SII is a weighted speech-to-noise ratio varying between 0 and 1. A value of 1 represents near perfect intelligibility and a value of 0 represents near perfect privacy).