Interview with Richard Ballinger from Denmark
Per Larsen spoke with Richard Ballinger and Lisbeth Rasmussen of COWI today following his paper regarding "How can large reverberant rooms be used for group conversation". Per made an interview with Richard after his lecture.
This paper at Internoise 2010 concerns establishing good acoustical quality in large reverberant rooms where conversation in groups is intended – such as study work in schools. Model calculations for a very reverberant hall using only absorbing screens have shown suitable acoustics for group work despite legislation not being complied to. They looked especially at values of speech intelligibility and other parameters such as speech clarity and spatial decay. Expected background levels and signal/noise ratios were very important to assess when considering speech considering speech intelligibility, and the work included this. Results showed that achieving good privacy and local optimised values could be achieved with absorbing screens and in some cases are better than the room with a lowered reverberation without screens.
Contact Richard Ballinger or Lisbeth Rasmussen at www.cowi.com
