Measures for assessing speech privacyof open-plan offices

Abstract

This paper reports on initial experiments to find out which single-number quantity is most appropriate and to assess the level of speech privacy in open-plan offices, including both short and long distances from the speaker. Field measurements in two open-plan offices were carried out to analyze spatial measures stated in ISO draft 3382-3. In the listening tests, the effects of single-number quantities on the speech privacy were investigated with variation of each single-number quantity using measured noises and impulse responses. Subjects were presented along with background noise and asked to rate both intelligibility and listening difficulty of Korean sentences. From the listening tests, relationships between single-numberquantities and sentence intelligibility scores (speech privacy) were obtained.