Characterizing Gymnasium Acoustics

There are currently no Canadian standards that specify the acoustical quality of gymnasia despite the persistent issue of poor speech intelligibility in these spaces. Several studies have found gymnasium acoustics problematic due to the non-diffuse nature of the sound field. The aim of this thesis is to characterize four gyms using reverberation time, sound pressure level, and speech transmission index to analyse the sound field of this typology. The analysis involved collecting results from field testing at two heights and modelling them in ODEON for comparison. It was shown that when measured in the field in accordance with ISO 3382, the presence of perimeter absorption does stratify the sound field to a small degree. There was found to be a large discrepancy in sound pressure level distribution in the measured versus simulated data.