6.10 Acoustic Screens

Screens can play an important role in the acoustic performance of open plan teaching spaces. The key benefit of well designed and effectively placed screens is acoustic separation between teaching zones. Example 1 illustrates the measured speech intelligibility from a teacher addressing pupils across two bananas and a group space. It can be seen that intelligibility drops off slightly as the receiver moves away from the teacher. This is due to the decay of sound over distance. If the depth of the seating was increased any further, the intelligibility levels at the rear seating would fall into the poor intelligibility band.

Due to the raked seating of the banana, the group space has no line of sight to the teacher. When the line of sight to the spoken voice is broken, intelligibility levels drop off dramatically 1. This reduction in intelligibility will result in an effective level of acoustic separation between these two teaching zones.