Acoustic parameters were analysed in nine auditoria and multi-purpose conference rooms in the University of Extremadura. Parameters related to the reverberation time, background noise, and intelligibility (both physical measurements of different parameters [Definition (D-50) and STI] and speech tests used to study the subjective response of listeners) were studied. The measurements were compared with some recommendations from the literature and, considering that speech was the main use of the studied rooms, with the intelligibility results. Some different recommendations for reverberation times taken from the literature were analysed. The intelligibility results obtained from the measurements were also compared with the intelligibility results that were determined by the speech tests.
The grid method is the most widely used technique for measurement-based noise assessment, and indeed is part of the ISO 1996-2 standard. Nevertheless it has certain disadvantages. The present work is an analysis of the grid method for evaluating noise, firstly in the city of Cáceres and, secondly in two other smaller towns. Using as reference a 200 metre grid study, a study was made of the effect of varying the size and form of the grid on the city’s overall noise value, the percentage of data found to lie above some reference thresholds, and the noise value assigned to a certain zone of the city. The ISO 1996 recommendations of the necessity of new sampling points and the method’s predictive capacity for these new measurements were also analyzed.