Center for the Built Environment

A common complaint in work spaces is lack of speech privacy in open plan and private offices. Standard methods exist to quantify speech privacy by measurement and calculation. Performing these methods, although accurate, requires the precision of expensive hardware and the experience of professional acousticians. Robert Young (1965) developed a simple method using common variables to accurately determine speech privacy. These variables can be estimated during design or measured after construction. A side by side evaluation of the standard speech privacy methods were compared to a method based on Young’s research. These evaluations determined that the methods had comparative levels of accuracy and the Young method costs substantially less to utilize. The measurements required by all of the evaluated methods were performed within three types of private office and three types of open plan office spaces. Following the testing of the private offices there was a review of the sound isolation of the shared partition and the background noise in the receiving office. Measurements in the open plan spaces were conducted in spaces with different height partitions to identify if this was a factor in the measured speech privacy level. A pink noise signal was used as the source noise for measurement between all of the tested spaces. The pink noise signal was adjusted to have a frequency response similar to a human voice. The constant level of pink noise was produced as a test signal for playback on a compact disc or MP3 player and an appropriate loudspeaker. The appendix summarizes all measurements.