Effects of sound insulation and light reflection of desktop partitions on subjective impression during conversation

In recent years, transparent desktop partitions have often been placed in public spaces to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Moreover, to clarify the view during conversation, surface materials with low light-reflectivity are developed for the partitions. In this paper, we conducted sound insulation measurements for partitions with four different materials, and two psychological experiments in order to examine the audio-visual effects on the ease of conversation. First, in non-visual conversation between two persons, better subjective evaluation of speech transmission was confirmed for partitions with lower surface density which have less insertion loss. However, in normal audio-visual conversation, the low light-reflective partitions got higher evaluations of not only visual but also auditory impressions, regardless of sound insulation performance. In addition, subjective evaluations among different materials varied in the quiet condition more remarkably than in the noisy condition.