Room acoustics affect communicative success in hybrid meeting spaces: a pilot study
This addresses the issue of overlooked acoustic design in hybrid meetings for universities and companies, but it is an incremental study with limited scope.
This pilot study tackled the problem of poor acoustics in hybrid meeting spaces by testing room acoustic interventions in a seminar room, finding that these interventions improved communicative success, though results were not statistically significant due to a small sample size.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, universities and companies have increasingly integrated hybrid features into their meeting spaces, or even created dedicated rooms for this purpose. While the importance of a fast and stable internet connection is often prioritized, the acoustic design of seminar rooms is frequently overlooked. Poor acoustics, particularly excessive reverberation, can lead to issues such as misunderstandings, reduced speech intelligibility or cognitive and vocal fatigue. This pilot study investigates whether room acoustic interventions in a seminar room at Graz University of Technology support better communication in hybrid meetings. For this purpose, we recorded two groups of persons twice, once before and once after improving the acoustics of the room. Our findings -- despite not reaching statistical significance due to the small sample size - indicate clearly that our spatial interventions improve communicative success in hybrid meetings. To make the paper accessible also for readers from the speech communication community, we explain room acoustics background, relevant for the interpretation of our results.