Conference_programme: 18.4 - Office noise : psychological effects and room acoustic design

Lecture: Fatigue and annoyance due to noise in open-plan offices: à laboratory study

Author(s): Kostallari Krist, Parizet Etienne, Chevret Patrick, Amato Jean-Noël, Galy Edith

Summary:
It seems now accepted that speech noise in open plan offices is the main source of annoyance for employees. This is verified either by field studies or by laboratory experiments (using a serial recall task in this latter case). Nevertheless, these experiments do not reflect the reality of an open-plan office because of the specificity of the task performed during a brief period of time. The aim of this study is to improve the representativeness of the experiments by increasing the duration of noise exposure while the participants perform a task closer to the everyday open-plan office work. Thirty-nine subjects between 20 and 62 years old participated to the experiment. They were exposed to three controlled sound conditions (stationary noise, ‘speech like’ amplitude-modulated noise and intelligible speech) during a period of a normal workday (six hours and forty-five minutes for each condition). The task consisted in writing a review of four newspapers. During each day, the psychological state, the perception of sound environment and the perceived workload were evaluated several times. Lastly, a serial recall task was performed at the beginning and at the end of each day.\nThe statistical analyses were performed with respect to two factors, the sound conditions and the time of the day. The results show that the sound conditions have a significant effect on the variables that describe the psychological state, the sound perception and the mental workload. This is the case for the sound annoyance, which increases when the sound is modulated in amplitude, but keeps constant during the day. On the contrary, the fatigue of the participants was influenced by both factors. Lastly, the time-of-day effect increases the scores of the indicators evaluating the psychological state of the participant as well as the perceived workload.

Corresponding author

Name: Mr Krist Kostallari

e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Country: France