The STI-Matrix - An Innovative Simulation-Based Method for the Acoustic Evaluation and Assessment of Offices and Public Areas

Complaints about noise in offices, restaurants and other public areas mostly originate in unwanted intelligibility of speech from other areas or in a lack of intelligibility within the own communication area. For any planning scenario these problems can be uncovered and minimized using computer-based simulation techniques. An innovative method which checks the requirements for the intelligibility by an automated calculation of the Speech Transmission Index STI for every pair of workplaces/positions will be presented using practical examples. The most important steps of a target-oriented acoustic planning are demonstrated - including the determination of the background noise, the STI calculation to the interpretation of the intelligibility-based "assessment-matrix".