Noise annoyance in open-plan offices.

It is a well-known fact that noise is a major source of discomfort in open-plan offices. The existing metrics, such as the equivalent sound level (LeqA), the reverberation time (RT), the speech spatial decay (D2S) or the speech transmission index (STI) are not sufficient to describe noise comfort in offices. This talk presents the main contributions to the evaluation of open-plan offices workers' comfort in the frame of five years collaboration between INRS and INSA de Lyon. Three major axes have been explored: the development of an assessment questionnaire, the setup of laboratory experiments, and the definition of relevant sound metrics.