Architectural acoustics from an interdisciplinary viewpoint
* Presenting author
Abstract:
W. C. Sabine, a pioneer in acoustics, made his first experiments in the field of architectural acoustics in the lecture hall of the Fogg Art Museum around 1897. He was asked to suggest improvements because the speech intelligibility was very poor and the hall too reverberant. Years of hard work led him to the derivation of the reverberation formula that we use today. Over 100 years later, together with students of Graz University of Technology we assessed the acoustic situation in 26 lecture halls to take a look how the acoustic situation in lecture halls evolved over the last decades. Acoustic measurements and subjective evaluations were carried out and a spider chart was designed for comparing subjective and objective measures for each lecture hall. The results suggest that the speech intelligibility in 14 out of the 26 halls is unsatisfactory. To improve the acoustic situation, a new approach is suggested which benefits from an interdisciplinary viewpoint between architecture and audio engineering. With the approach “research through design”, collaborative student projects are implemented to improve the situations in lecture halls with innovative architectural designs and acoustic concepts.