Speaker
Description
The 3D printed architecture together with the expanding capabilities of contemporary parametric design platforms has opened remarkable opportunities to complex geometric explorations and function integration. In this context, perceptual investigations result important to go beyond single parameter objective values and highlight the benefits of design solutions allowing for a more optimized use of complex surfaces. Therefore, this work investigates the application of 3D-printed hybrid acoustic materials (HAMs), designed and developed by BioG3D (Greece), which combine sound absorption and diffusion properties in a single office setting within the Living Lab of Politecnico di Torino (Italy). Both an objective and subjective investigation has been performed to compare 6 configurations obtained by varying HAMs location at different heights and their geometric distributions, while preserving the same number of elements. The different settings have been characterized by monaural, binaural and spatial impulse responses measurements using two different type of sources, i.e. an omnidirectional dodecahedron and a Talkbox. The objective room acoustic parameters (Reverberation Time, Clarity and STI) have been estimated and the aspects related to the perceived speech clarity improvements have been investigated comparing the different configurations through a subjective ABX test. The results clearly demonstrate the crucial role of design control variables and perceptual investigation in achieving optimized conditions.