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Acoustical Design Guide For Open Offices
Acoustical Design Guide For Open Offices
Warnock, A.C.C.
IRC-RR-163
March 2004
http://irc.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/ircpubs
Acoustical Design Guide for Open Offices
INTRODUCTION
This design guide was prepared as part of a research project funded by
PWGSC to investigate speech privacy in open-plan offices. Two major
types of work area in open offices are currently in vogue:
Within the team-style work area, where sound paths are usually quite
unobstructed, speech can be very intrusive. Since team-style work areas
are usually separated from each other by fairly high barriers, offices
incorporating this type of work area have the same problems with
intrusive speech between work areas as found in offices having mainly
cubicles.
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Office Layout
Æ
Ceiling systems may also be evaluated for use in open offices using a
test method ASTM E11111. This method gives a rating called the
articulation class1 (AC). The requirement that SAA should be 0.9 or more
is equivalent to requiring AC to be greater than 180.
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The factors determining the level of speech within the work area are:
A B
C D
Figure 3: Example layout for a team-style work area. The gray rectangles
represent barriers. The arrows show direct, reflected and one diffracted
path between occupants.
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Acoustical Design Guide for Open Offices
All the requirements given for cubicle-style office fittings must be met if
speech in the team-style area is to be minimally intrusive. In addition, the
following factors should be optimized during the design of a team-style
work area.
• The behavior of the occupants in the work area will also determine
the degree of disturbance within the work area and in adjacent work
areas. If in Figure 3 B speaks to C by turning around and calling
across the work area, this is more disruptive than if B crosses the
space to talk quietly to C. If passers-by call across the work area,
this will clearly be disruptive.
• The greater the distance between occupants, the greater the sound
attenuation. The changes in attenuation due to increasing distance
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Pivotal to both standards is the level and spectrum of the voice used in
calculations. Figure 4 shows the idealized spectrum for “normal” speech
defined in ANSI S3.5. As noted in the figure caption, the overall level is
59.2 dBA. In different circumstances, people raise or lower their voice as
they perceive it necessary. The ANSI standard leaves it to the user to
decide on the appropriate level. ASTM E1130 specifies a different
spectrum at a specific level to be used in open office work; that spectrum
is also shown in Figure 4.
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60
55
ANSI S3.5 1997
ASTM E1130
50
NRC
45
SPL, dB
40
35
30
25
125 250 500 1k 2k 4k 8k
Frequency, Hz
Figure 4: Spectrum for normal speech defined in ANSI S3.5. The overall
level is 59.2 dBA. Also shown is the voice spectrum to be used in
measurements and calculations according to ASTM E1130. The overall
level is 57.5 dBA. The NRC data is the average of measurements of
male and female speakers in open offices. The overall level is 50.3 dBA.
With the same voice and background noise levels, the two standards
give slightly different ratings. The relationship found in research
conducted by NRC as part of this project8 is
Recent work at NRC9 has clarified the relationship between SII and the
percentage of speech understood. From that work, Figure 5 shows the
mean test score as a function of SII for 29 subjects presented with 100
sentences in different acoustical simulations of offices. The relationship
is clearly not linear and intelligibility only begins to decrease significantly
when SII drops below about 0.3. At SII = 0.2, the mean score is almost
80%. Different individuals have different listening skills and the scatter in
the experiment is not shown in Figure 5.
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100%
80%
60%
Score
40%
20%
0%
0.0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7
Speech Intelligibility Index
40
0.15≤SII≤0.2
30
Frequency, %
20
10
0
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
Score
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Privacy Distracting
Confidential extremely
moderately
good very
acceptable moderately
a little a little
These considerations deal only with acoustics. An SII of 0.15 does not
necessarily indicate occupant satisfaction with all aspects of an open
office. Other psychological factors play a role in determining overall
satisfaction.
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This factor can be utilized when planning office layouts. If the normal
working positions have occupants facing away from each other, then
speech intrusion will be decreased but only so long as the talker does
not turn from the working position. During telephone conversations, it is
likely that the talker will remain turned away from adjacent employees.
However, if a face-to-face conversation is taking place at one
workstation, the talkers might well turn toward other nearby workers.
0
60
330 30 250 Hz
1 kHz
50
300 60
40
270 30 90
240 120
210 150
180
Figure 8: Directivity measured for male talkers for the 250 and 1000 Hz
octave bands.
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Figure 11: Sound diffraction around barriers and reflection from walls and
furniture in the horizontal plane.
Barrier Diffraction
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possible but only if the ceiling is perfectly absorbing. Work within this
project14 showed that absorbing material on the upper edge of the barrier
increases the attenuation.
0.5
0.4
Decrease in SII
0.3
0.2
0.1
0
1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8
Barrier Height, m
ρ =1−α
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25
20
Attenuation of reflection, dB 15
10
0
0.65 0.70 0.75 0.80 0.85 0.90 0.95 1.00
Absorption Coefficient
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Thus, if only AC data area available, the corresponding SAA value can
be reliably estimated.
The ceiling and the floor in an office present the largest surfaces that
might reflect sound. Typical absorption coefficients for carpet in an office
are low, so sounds will reflect with little loss of energy. In mitigation,
however, there are usually many obstacles (screens, desks, filing
cabinets, chairs) that block and interfere with reflections from the floor.
Thus in some cases, floor reflections could be very important but not in
others. Reflections from the ceiling, however, are seldom interfered with
by office furnishings.
*
The absorption coefficients used in this calculation are theoretical
values that do not directly relate to values obtained from reverberation
room measurements.
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30
Screen Height, m
1.2
1.3
1.4
25
1.5
1.6
1.7
Attenuation, dB 1.8
1.9
20
2.0
15
10
0.65 0.70 0.75 0.80 0.85 0.90 0.95 1.00 1.05
Ceiling absorption coefficient
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REFERENCES
1
ASTM C423. Standard Test method for sound absorption and sound
absorption coefficients by the reverberation room method.
2
ASTM E795. Standard Practices for mounting test specimens during
sound absorption tests.
3
ASTM E90. Standard Test Method for Laboratory Measurement of
Airborne Sound Transmission Loss of Building Partitions.
4
CBD-164. Acoustical Effects of Screens in Landscaped Offices, A.C.C.
Warnock. http://irc.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/cbd/cbd164e.html
5
ANSI S3.5. American National Standard Methods for the Calculation of
the Speech Intelligibility Index.
6
ASTM E1130. Standard Test method for objective measurement of
speech privacy in open offices using articulation index.
7
Voice and Background Noise Levels Measured in Open Offices, W.T.
Chu and A.C.C. Warnock. Internal Report IR-837. Institute for Research
in Construction. NRCC. August 2000. http://irc.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/fulltext/irc-
ir-837/
8
Measurements of Sound Propagation in Open Offices, A.C.C. Warnock
and W.T. Chu. Internal Report IR-836. Institute for Research in
Construction. NRCC. August 2000. http://irc.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/fulltext/irc-ir-
836/
9
Describing Levels of Speech Privacy in Open Offices. J.S. Bradley and
B.N. Gover. Research Report RR-138 Institute for Research in
Construction. NRCC. September 2003. http://irc.nrc-
cnrc.gc.ca/fulltext/rr138/
10
Detailed Directivity of Sound Fields around Human Talkers, W.T. Chu
and A.C.C. Warnock. Research Report RR-104, Institute for Research in
Construction. NRCC. September 2001. http://irc.nrc-
cnrc.gc.ca/fulltext/rr104/
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Appendix: Review of Open Office Acoustics
11
Sound Propagation in a Simulated ‘Team-style’ Open Office, W.T. Chu
and A.C.C. Warnock. Research Report RR-156, Institute for Research in
Construction. NRCC. February 2004. http://irc.nrc-
cnrc.gc.ca/fulltext/rr156/
12
Maekawa, Z. Noise Reduction by screens. Applied Acoustics, Vol 1.
p157, 1968.
13
Expressions of Maekawa’s Chart for Computation. K. Yamamoto and
K. Takagi. Appl. Acoustics, 37, p75, 1992.
14
Measurements of screen insertion loss in an anechoic chamber,
A.C.C. Warnock and W.T. Chu. Research Report RR-157. Institute for
Research in Construction. NRCC. February 2004. http://irc.nrc-
cnrc.gc.ca/fulltext/rr157/
15
Prediction of the speech intelligibility index behind a single screen in
an open-plan office. Applied Acoustics, 63, (8), August 2002 and
Acoustic Behavior of a Single Screen Barrier in an Open-plan Office. C.
Wang and J.S. Bradley. Report B3205.1, January 2001.
16
ASTM E1111 Standard Test method for measuring interzone
attenuation of ceiling systems
17
ASTM E1110 Standard Classification for determination of articulation
class.
18
Comparison of two test methods for evaluating sound absorption of
ceiling panels. A.C.C. Warnock. RR-158. Institute for Research in
Construction. NRCC. February 2004. http://irc.nrc-
cnrc.gc.ca/fulltext/rr158/
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