Assessing the Acoustical Climate of Underground Stations

Designing a proper acoustical environment—indispensable to speech recognition—in long enclosures is difficult. Although there is some literature on the acoustical conditions in underground stations, there is still little information about methods that make estimation of correct reverberation conditions possible. This paper discusses the assessment of the reverberation conditions of underground stations. A comparison of the measurements of reverberation time in Warsaw’s underground stations with calculated data proves there are divergences between measured and calculated early decay time values, especially for long source–receiver distances. Rapid speech transmission index values for measured stations are also presented.