Evaluating airborne sound insulation in terms of speech intelligibility

This paper reports on an evaluation of ratings of the sound insulation of simulated walls in terms of the intelligibility of speech transmitted through the walls. Subjects listened to speech modified to simulate transmission through 20 different walls with a wide range of sound insulation ratings, with constant ambient noise. The subjects' mean speech intelligibility scores were compared with various physical measures to test the success of the measures as sound insulation ratings. The standard Sound Transmission Class (STC) and Weighted Sound Reduction Index ratings were only moderately successful predictors of intelligibility scores, and eliminating the 8 dB rule from STC led to very modest improvements. Various previously established speech intelligibility measures (e.g., Articulation Index or Speech Intelligibility Index) and measures derived from them, such as the Articulation Class, were all relatively strongly related to speech intelligibility scores. In general, measures that involved arithmetic averages or summations of decibel values over frequency bands important for speech were most strongly related to intelligibility scores. The two most accurate predictors of the intelligibility of transmitted speech were an arithmetic average transmission loss over the frequencies from 200 to 2.5 kHz and the addition of a new spectrum weighting term to R(w) that included frequencies from 400 to 2.5 kHz.