Acoustical characteristics of classrooms of tropical climate

This paper presents in-situ objective acoustical measurements and assessment of acoustical characteristics for the analysis of the classroom acoustics of the Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology (VNIT) located in Nagpur, India as a representative case. Nine classrooms of VNIT, Nagpur as representative classroom typologies are assessed and presented in this paper. The analysis based on in-situ measured indicators of room acoustic quality, such as reverberation time (RT30), clarity (C50), background noise (BN), and the speech transmission index (STI), permit the identification of certain salient features of classroom acoustics in a tropical climate like India and complementary practical challenges associated with natural ventilation. The paper concludes by outlining acoustic concerns observed in the objectively identified and investigated classrooms of a tropical climate of the representative case. The conclusions are also supplemented with few recommendations for acoustical retrofit measures.