Abstract
The acoustic analysis provides additional information on building tradition and related indoor practice that includes sound, thus deepening our understanding of architectural heritage. In this paper, the sound field of the Orthodox medieval church Lazarica (Kruševac city, Serbia) is examined. Lazarica is a representative of Morava architectural style, developed in the final period of the Serbian medieval state, when also the chanting art thrived, proving the importance of the aural environment in Serbian churches. The church plan is a combination of a traditional inscribed cross and a triconch. After the in situ measurement of acoustic impulse response using EASERA software, we built a computer model in the acoustic simulation software EASE and calibrated it accordingly. Following the parameters (reverberation time (T30), early decay time (EDT) and speech transmission index (STI)), we examined the acoustic effect of the space occupancy, central dome and the iconostasis. In all the cases, no significant deviation between T30 and EDT parameter was observed, which indicates uniform sound energy decay. Closing the dome with a flat ceiling did not show any significant impact on T30, but it lowered speech intelligibility. The height of iconostasis showed no significant influence on the acoustics of Lazarica church.
Highlights
Architecture of a medieval church is a complex symbolical-metaphorical construct imbued with different references from a wide range of human experience [1]
The main intention of acoustic measurements conducted on-site was to investigate monophonic acoustic parameters defined by ISO 3382 set of standards, as a starting point for further analysis of basic sound field properties and comparison with values of acoustic parameters obtained by acoustic model simulation
The goal of this paper was to examine the acoustics of Lazarica church, as a typical representative of a Morava architectural style, with a layout that combines a compressed inscribed cross and a triconch
Summary
Architecture of a medieval church is a complex symbolical-metaphorical construct imbued with different references from a wide range of human experience [1]. The multidisciplinary field of archaeoacoustics tends to introduce the balance of our comprehension of the history of a building by taking into account the aural environment influenced by various interconnected factors that create human experience in historical buildings, arguing that such acoustic heritage should be considered as an intangible and inseparable layer of architectural heritage [2,3]. Archaeoacoustic research of Orthodox churches covers a wide spectre of approaches Among many, it includes the analysis of existing or virtually modelled church acoustics, comparison of the acoustic data from churches built in different periods [13], analysis of the live chant recorded on-site [14,15], and correlation of the development of chant and sacral architecture [16,17]
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