“How you improve speech privacy in open-plan offices”

Reported from ICA Madrid

John Bradley – National Research Council, Montreal

Better speech privacy in open-plan offices can be most consistently achieved by a combination of quantitative design procedures and validation measurements, says John Bradley. This has not usually been done in the past because of the lack of convenient design and measurement tools. While signal-to-noise type measures such as the Articulation Index have been used to indicate the amount of speech privacy in North American offices, often Speech Transmission Index values have been used in European offices.

Piere Chigot interviewed John after his presentations
Listen to the interview (preferably use headphones or loudspeakers)
http://www.acousticbulletin.com/EN/audio/dewplayer.swf?son=http://www.acousticbulletin.com/EN/John%20Bradley.mp3&bgcolor=#FFFFFF

John Bradley presented the relationships among speech privacy measures, their relationships with speech intelligibility scores, and how they relate to the geometrical and acoustical properties of open-plan office workstations. Good acoustical design goals can be set in terms of these speech privacy measures and required optimum ambient noise levels. New computer-based tools to aid in the design and measurement of the speech privacy in open-plan offices can make it possible to more consistently achieve desired results.