Office speech privacy requires noise levels unattainable in practice.

Evidence

To study questions of privacy, a “quiet” office (N5 = 4.7 sone) and a “louder” office (N5 = 9.6 sone) were chosen. With a rhyme-test after Sotscheck, 50% speech intelligibility is obtained at a speech level of 38 dB for the “quiet” office, and 47 dB for the “louder” office. A speech level of only 38 dB is rather unrealistic in an office, and even 47 dB speech level will be exceeded in many practical cases. Therefore, in the “quiet” office, privacy is impossible, and even in the “louder” office, the desired privacy will be violated in many cases. — Professor Dr.-Ing. Hugo Fastl, Professor Dr.-Ing. Eberhard, Psychoacoustics- Facts and Models, 1823

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• QUESTION: How much loudness (in sone) does typical office conversation produce, and what would ‘realistic’ speech privacy actually require?
• SHARE: For an acoustics-conscious friend who designs open offices: ordinary office speech levels defeat privacy unless background noise is far higher than most specs assume.

Related

• Typical offices lack the acoustics needed to keep speech private. (similarity 0.96)
• Offices judged loud run percentile loudness of ten to twenty sone (similarity 0.81)
• Speech intelligibility harms open-plan office quality, unlike in auditoria (similarity 0.81)