The focus on acoustics in recent standards and guidelines such as the ANSI Standard S12.60, the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) for Schools system, and the Collaborative for High Performance Schools (CHPS) has rightly been on classrooms. Each of them does address other school environments also, although sometimes without particular specificity. After reviewing relevant American standards and guidelines for gymnasiums, libraries, lobbies, corridors, auditoriums, and other spaces that do not fit neatly into the classroom designation, this paper addresses good practices in the acoustical design of such critical environments through the use of a series of case studies. Specifically, the authors suggest room acoustics design parameters and appropriate background noise and sound isolation criteria for non-classroom spaces in primary and secondary schools.

Substantial data from previous research show that children and adults require different acoustical conditions for good understanding. For example, adults can understand the majority of speech when the audibility of the speech is reduced to 40% or 20%, but young children need 80% or 60% audibility for the same level of understanding. Also, while adults need 4 to 6 bands of vocoded speech to reach good performance levels, children need 8–12 bands. While adults experience a release from masking when signals and background noise arise from different angles, children do not gain the same benefit, and in fact may experience masking from background noises coming from any direction. J.H. and J.S. from Acentech prepared auralizations that demonstrate these differences between children and adults. Those auralizations will be presented and discussed as possible educational tools.

The acoustical conditions in a classroom play an integral role in establishing an ideal learning environment. Speech intelligibility is dependent on many factors, including speech loudness, room finishes, and background noise levels. The goal of this investigation was to use computer modeling techniques to study the effect of acoustical conditions on speech intelligibility in a classroom. This study focused on a simulated classroom which was generated using the catt-acoustic computer modeling program. The computer was utilized as an analytical tool in an effort to optimize speech intelligibility in a typical classroom environment. The factors that were focused on were reverberation time, location of absorptive materials, and background noise levels. Speech intelligibility was measured with the Rapid Speech Transmission Index (RASTI) method.

A large new performing arts building at a university included an 800-seat recital hall, proscenium theater, black box theater, large instrumental rehearsal room, choral rehearsal room, and practice rooms. It was designed with attention to acoustics concerns throughout, but the final results left the owner with a myriad of problems. These problems included poor hearing conditions in the large performance space, intrusion of exterior environmental noise, excessive mechanical system noise and vibration, and inexplicable lack of separation between rehearsal rooms that were separated by an STC 70+ wall. The authors parsed through the complaints and field conditions to extract a range of reasons for the problems. The paper presents the analysis techniques for these challenges and shows options that were developed for practical solutions.

As consultants, the authors have been called into dozens of projects built without the benefit of guidance from an acoustician, and the results are often disastrous (and in many cases, litigious). This presentation, replete with photographic evidence, outlines some of the biggest mistakes encountered recently by design teams that lack a critical team player: the qualified acoustical consultant. Consider a natatorium with all hard surfaces and a 6-s reverberation time to match, a fieldhouse gymnasium with a 70-dB background noise level, and a distressingly common problem in New England: residential condominiums converted from an old mill building with nothing between stacked residences except exposed, unimproved hardwood decking. Other examples relate to inadequate (or altogether absent) vibration isolation of elevator machinery and other mechanical equipment, cacophonous restaurant acoustics, blatant disregard for a nearby railway, and poor music practice facilities.