SUBJECTIVE RATING AND OBJECTIVE EVALUATION OF THE ACOUSTIC AND INDOOR CLIMATE CONDITIONS IN VIDEO CONFERENCING ROOMS

Today, face-to-face meetings are frequently replaced by video conferences in order to reduce costs and carbon footprint related to travels and to increase the company efficiency. Yet, complaints about the difficulty of understanding the speech of the participants in both rooms of the video conference occur. The aim of this study is to find out the main causes of difficulties in speech communication. Correlation studies between subjective perceptions were conducted through questionnaires and objective acoustic and indoor climate parameters related to video conferencing. Based on four single-room and three combined-room measurements, it was found that the traditional measure of speech, such as the speech transmission index, was not correlated with the subjective classifications. Thus, a correlation analysis was conducted as an attempt to find the hidden factors behind the subjective perceptions, revealing the speech intelligibility during video conferencing was highly correlated to EDT, D50, and MTI in the 125 Hz frequency band.