Speech related acoustical parameters in classrooms and their relationships

A survey on the speech related acoustical parameters in the Hong Kong classrooms having standardized architectural layouts is carried out in the present study. Results suggest that these acoustical parameters are highly correlated with each other even across different octave bands. It is also found that the relationships between parameters of different kinds do not depend on the frequency bands. Besides, the present results indicate that the sound pulse decay inside a not very reverberant classroom consists of an initial fast decay, leading to deviations of the field survey results from those predicted by the exponential decay under the uniform sound energy decay assumption. It is believed that the strong correlations between the various speech related acoustical parameters and the regression information obtained in the present study can help the estimation of the speech quality of the classrooms in the design stage.