Sensitivity to noise and light

The built environment researcher Giuseppina Emma Puglisi surveyed 1,934 people from an Italian university and from large and small companies during the first lockdown, between March and May 2020, about noise while working at home. 55% worked in a room of their own, 43% in a shared room such as a kitchen or living room and 2% outdoors, and 57% had nobody else in the room. 57% described themselves as sensitive to noise. Of all the sources asked about, the one named most often as the main disturbance was other people: talking, moving about, making calls, listening to music. A quarter of the sample named it.

The built environment researcher Lisanne Bergefurt tested the same relationship inside offices, with 214 employees of two organisations and a structural equation model built on person-environment fit. Perceived sound distraction was negatively related to concentration at a beta of −0.67. The two kinds of sound had opposite signs on exhaustion. Disturbance from unintelligible background sound went with higher exhaustion, at a beta of 0.10, while disturbance from intelligible speech went the other way, at −0.11. Stressful mood was associated with exhaustion at 0.57 and fatigue at 0.21, and correlated with poor sleep quality at −0.59.

The lighting researcher Jennifer Veitch re-analysed lighting data with the participants split by a validated test of visual stress, the Wilkins Pattern Glare Sensitivity test, into thirteen scoring low and thirteen scoring high. Phantom arrays are the streaks of light some people see when a modulated light source or their eyes move. Across the full sample of 26, the Flicker Index predicted how often someone detected them at a Spearman rho of 0.68, with p = .04, and the alternative metric at 0.53, which did not reach significance. Among the thirteen with low visual stress sensitivity, neither metric predicted anything at all, at 0.28 and 0.18. The standard metrics describe the high-sensitivity group and not the other one.

The architecture researcher Yuanyuan Zhang tested 30 people on serial recall under 14 acoustic conditions in a Chinese open-plan office setting: quiet, speech alone, and twelve combinations of four masking sources with three signal-to-noise ratios. The masking sources were speech-like pink noise, air-conditioning noise, the sound of a spring and babble. The best of the twelve was the water sound at a medium signal-to-noise ratio of −2.4 dB, on both performance and perceived quality. Zhang reports that the effect of masking differed by individual factors including sex and education.

The occupational health researcher Mohammad Javad Sheikhmozafari surveyed 66 employees of one open-plan office in Shiraz in 2021. The telephone was the source heard most often, and a third of the respondents experienced it as continuous rather than intermittent. The purpose of the study was to validate a Persian translation of a questionnaire on noise and comfort, so the descriptive figures are a by-product of an instrument test in a single office.

Puglisi’s 1,934 respondents are the only large sample here. Bergefurt worked with 214 people in two organisations. Zhang tested 30 in a laboratory, Veitch re-analysed 26 in two groups of thirteen, and Sheikhmozafari surveyed 66 in one office while validating a questionnaire.