Acoustic design in contemporary museums: Balancing architectural aesthetics and auditory experience

Despite the critical role of auditory environments, contemporary museum designs often prioritize visual aesthetics—characterized by highly reflective surfaces, high-volume rooms, and open-plan layouts—resulting in acoustic challenges such as excessive background noise, high reverberation, poor speech intelligibility, and lack of privacy. In this study, room impulse responses were measured in prominent contemporary museums, including the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), and used to calibrate acoustic simulations. These simulations informed the development of proposed scenarios aimed at enhancing the acoustic quality of these spaces. Key parameters analyzed include the speech transmission index (STI), distraction distance (rD), clarity (C50), reverberation time (RT), and background noise level (Lp,A,B). The findings underscore the critical role of integrating acoustics into architectural design, providing architects and acousticians with practical strategies to balance auditory and visual elements—ultimately creating museum environments that enhance both speech communication and immersive auditory experiences.