Acoustical comfort in university lecture halls: simulating the dynamic role of occupancy

The acoustic comfort in teaching environments is generally determined through requirements concerning reverberation time, speech intelligibility and HVAC noise. The presence of students reduces the reverberation time but concurrently increases the background noise, that undermines the focus of students and the vocal effort of teachers. A double set of measures were acquired in two university lecture halls in unoccupied and occupied state to investigate the consequences of occupancy variations. Acoustic simulations allowed to assess the dynamic effects of the occupancy detecting the differences of speech intelligibility. Predicting the student activity may return reliable outcomes improving the quality of lessons.