A comparative study on soundscapes in real (RE) and virtual (VE) open offıce environments.

This study proposes a soundwalk procedure for evaluating indoor soundscapes and investigates the occupants' auditory perception of office environment in an architectural office firm, Demay Architecture in Ankara. The aim of the study is to compare the auditory perception in a real office environment (RE) and virtual office environment (VE). To analyze RE, a total of 30 (23 females and 7 males) voluntary visitors were evaluated as a first group. The second group which experience VE consisted of 30 participants (21 females and 9 males).In the real environment of the study (RE), groups of participants walked in silence over the course of a predefined route, observing the soundscape and the office environment. On a predefined route, there were 10 locations to listen to office sounds during the soundwalk experiment. After listening, there was an expectation to fill the questionnaire Method A (ISO/TS 12913-2) for each location and throughout the experiment, LAeq levels were measured for all locations. Method A includes a scaling task of the eight perceptual attributes that are 'eventful', 'uneventful', 'vibrant', 'monotonous', 'pleasant', 'annoying', 'calm', and 'chaotic' to define occupants' auditory perception for these two environments. Additionally, the binaural audio-video recording technique from RE was implemented after soundwalk as a preparation for designing VE. The results show that occupants mostly perceive the real office environment (RE) more positively than the virtual office environment (VE) in terms of eight perceptual attributes. RE was perceived as more pleasant and calm although VE was perceived as more annoying and chaotic.