Performance Evaluation of an open plan office Before and After an Acoustic Retrofit

The acoustic environment in offices influences work productivity and affects employee satisfaction. In Brazil, it is very common to find rental offices with gypsum ceilings, which make them highly reverberant, increasing sound levels, hindering telephone communication, and reducing employees' concentration, ultimately affecting productivity. In most cases, undertaking a renovation to install a new ceiling is financially and operationally unfeasible. Reverberation time is no longer the sole indicator for assessing office acoustic quality, as more recent metrics are presented in ISO 3382-3 and ISO 22955 standards. This study conducted measurements of acoustic quality parameters in an office before and after the installation of acoustic panels over a monolithic gypsum ceiling, comparing the obtained results with those from computational simulations and currently available calculation methods.