Speaker
Description
Noise is a persistent issue in open-plan offices, and soundscape temporal and spectral variations were found to explain part of perceived annoyance. While acoustic treatments and sound masking systems can help reducing the overall level and speech intelligi- bility, they are not designed to adapt to those varia- tions. Other approaches based on a transformation of the existing soundscape have been investigated, but were never applied to the office context. To explore the relevance of soundscape augmentation approaches in open-plan offices, we seek to gain consistent in- sights about people’s sound experiences at work. This paper presents a study based on a human-centred methodology, where participants reported their lived experiences through a diary and were invited to ver- balize about their observations and feelings during semi-directed interviews. Data collected from the di- aries showed that speech was identified as the most frequently perceived sound source, although it was not always badly perceived. Affective judgment such as perceived annoyance and pleasantness seemed to be partly explained by noise sources’ level, relevance and frequency. Also, earphones with music was the most widely used coping strategy. We hope to access a deeper understanding of the noise issue by further analyzing data from the interviews.