Room noise criteria - THe state of the art in the year 2000

Rating of noise in building spaces has a long history. To some extent, advance s in methods for evaluating sound in building s has paralleled the development of electronic sound measurement instrumentation. The first step in this evolution was simply to devise instrument s that could repeatable measure sound. No sooner was this possible than electronic instrumentation advanced, further enabling the measurement of sound in frequency bands. The frequency discrimination of octave band sound measurements paved the way for advances in understanding the impact of noise on communication and hearing.