Avaliação da qualidade acústica de escola estadual do projeto Governo Cidadão como parâmetro para adequação das diretrizes de padrões referenciais de projeto

Abstract

The school environment aims to be the stage for the academic and personal development of children, youth, and adults. In this space where the exchange of information is constant, one of the main means by which the teaching-learning dynamics materializes is the voice. The sound of human speech, whether originating from the teacher or from the student, is often competing with different noises, and propagating in environments that, due to their physical characteristics, decrease their clarity and understanding. Solutions to these unfavorable circumstances are often accessible and implementable, especially if these issues are considered at the design stage. Aiming to contribute to the improvement of the acoustic quality of schools in the state of Rio Grande do Norte, this work aims to evaluate the acoustic quality of the State School Ivani Machado Bezerra and to propose guidelines for the improvement of acoustic comfort specifications in the manual “Referential Standards of School Functioning” (document under development by the State Secretariat for Education, Culture, Sports and Leisure), on which the analyzed building’s project was based. For this, the methodological procedures consisted of the collection of data about the school and its rooms, measurements of speech intelligibility parameters (reverberation time, initial decay time, speech transmission index, signal-to-noise ratio, among others) in specific rooms, and the qualitative analysis of school design decisions and the contents of the manual based on the scientific literature. The study indicated that rooms’ acoustic treatment and the guidelines in the manual are below the standards referenced in different technical sources. With the help of simulations made on the EASE software, design guidelines for the document of referential standards have been suggested, so that future schools can be built and existing schools can be renovated in a way that meets the acoustic needs of the activities in the school environment.