| Canada’s
Parliament Buildings are in desperate need of repair.
Over the next decade the East West and Central Blocks
will undergo major renovations. The existing House of
Commons is in the Central Block. The nation’s
business, of course, cannot be interrupted for
construction crews so a new temporary House of Commons is
going to be inserted into the West Block. When the
Commons is finished with the room it will be turned over
to the Senate. Aercoustics was proud to participate in
this project, the country’s most important room for
speech. The work shown here comes from the computer modeling we used to quantify and optimize speech intelligibility in the room. The coloured maps shown on the right are plan view representations of speech intelligibility. Red is good and blue is bad. The map at the top is the original design presented to us at the beginning of the project. The sound source is located at the Prime Minister’s desk. His voice is directed toward the Speaker’s chair at the extreme right. There is a small patch of red near the PM indicating good speech intelligibility and a much larger zone of blue behind him, indicating poor speech intelligibility. In the second map, the blue zone of poor intelligibility is significantly reduced, simply by adding soft acoustic materials to the ceiling. In the final optimisation, the red zone of good intelligibility is increased by tilting and curving the Strangers’ Gallery sofitts. Our computer models were also used to create virtual sound samples, allowing us to listen to speech in the room before it was built.
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