PREDICTION OF SOUND-PRESSURE LEVEL IN AN OCCUPIED ENCLOSURE

In a room with inadequate sound absorption, occupants may suffer from low speech intelligibility due to the high noise level resulting from human activities. For effective communication, they tend to raise thei r voices. In the present study, a method which takes into account the effect of raising voices is derived to predict the variation of A-weig hted sound level inside an enclosure in which the number of occupants changes with time. Site measurements are also performed in a canteen o f capacity around 250. The model predicts the variations of A-weighted sound levels with a number of occupants with sufficient accuracy for engineering applications. (C) 1997 Acoustical Society of America.