Reflections on the scientific basis of building-related acoustic standards

As with standards in other indoor-environmental quality, standards play also an important role in building and room acoustics field. They are typically expected to a) represent the state of the art in the respective area and b) arbitrate if a building's design and construction meets the mandated requirements. It is thus important to ensure that the standards' mandates are indeed based on sound scientific evidence. Given their utility as a source of guidance for practitioners, the standards of course need not be conceived as scientific treatises. Nonetheless, the respect for and trust in the standardization bodies and the documents they issue is arguably proportional to the strength of their underlying scientific basis. Given this presupposition, the main intention of the present contribution is to examine, via the review of 19 European, American, and international standards in the domain of building and room acoustic, if they provide, either directly or indirectly, evidence with regard to the included requirements and mandates. The results of this review suggest that the majority of the selected acoustic standards provide sparse references to the evidentiary basis of their mandates. Nonetheless, there are also contrary instances, where standards engage, to some degree, the experimental evidence underlying their mandates. A case study of such an instance displays the potential for future developments in developing explicitly evidence-based standards.