Examining the relationship between room acoustics parameters and the cafe effect in restaurants

It is well known that the so-called café effect, the progressive increase in speech effort as an enclosed space becomes more crowded with talkers, is related to the reverberant characteristics of the room. This study attempts to correlate specific room acoustics parameters (total absorption, reverberation time, etc.) to the café effect through analysis of several existing restaurants. At each establishment, noise monitoring was conducted over the course of a busy weekend, followed by corresponding impulse response measurements in the empty room. Results and conclusions from the study will be presented.