Abstract
A pharmacy is a place which needs a proper speech transmission performance for giving customers accurate information about medicine. In addition, in a pharmacy, it is important to take considerable care of conversation leakage, because the conversation between a customer and a pharmacist includes lots of the customer’s personal information. This study focused on the sound insulation performance of partition walls installed in the pharmacy. The partition walls at counters may effectively achieve speech privacy by using a sound masking system. In this study, three pharmacies in Tokyo which have different partition design and room acoustic conditions were investigated. Acoustical conditions were actually measured and the effectiveness of the partition walls on sound masking efficiency was investigated through subjective tests using a three-dimensional sound filed simulation system. From the result, it was clarified that the partition walls had an influence on the masking efficiency. Moreover, high quality of speech privacy is satisfied by contrived management of layout planning, improvement of partition walls and using the sound masking system.
