Balancing speech intelligibility and privacy in museums: A perceptual study using spatial sound reproduction

Contemporary museum environments often prioritize visual aesthetics over acoustic quality, resulting in spaces that challenge both speech intelligibility and privacy. Building on prior research J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 157, A140 that identified trade-offs between reverberation control, speech transmission index (STI), and spatial decay parameters, this study compares listener responses to spatialized museum environments rendered in two audio reproduction settings. The first is Acentech’s 3DListening space—a near-anechoic room with a 13-loudspeaker ambisonic array—and the second is the CRAIVE-Lab at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, featuring a 128-channel loudspeaker array and panoramic visuals that recreate rooms at architectural scale. Participants evaluate three acoustic scenarios derived from measurements and simulations of five museum galleries, each featuring varying levels of absorption in the finishing materials. Results reveal a preference for scenarios characterized by higher absorption, lower sound pressure levels at moderate distances (L p,A,S,4m), and steeper spatial decay rates (D 2,S), even when these configurations yield higher distraction distances (r D). The goal is to provide insight into the use of virtual environments as predictive tools for subjective acoustic comfort in built spaces and inform design strategies that balance speech intelligibility and privacy, while also assessing how playback format influences perceptual responses.