Modeling Measurement Uncertainty in Room Acoustics

This paper investigates a way of determining and modeling uncertainty contributions in measurements of room acoustic parameters, which are commonly used to describe the acoustic situation of a room in an objective manner. If the range of uncertainty and the confidence interval are not given, the results remain incomparable to other measurement teams, since modern PC-based measurements still show appreciable sources of measurement errors. The Guide to the Expression of Uncertainty in Measurement (GUM) defines a unified guideline for determining uncertainties in all fields of measurement. Its application is increasingly required by modern measurement standards. However, the GUM procedures have not been applied to room acoustics yet. Hence, a scalable linear approach for calculating the combined uncertainty of room acoustic parameters with regard to the input quantities is proposed. In-situ measurement results of specially designed experiments show the significance of the main influence factors and are used to build the uncertainty budget.