Abstract
The new guidelines of the Catholic Church are in line with the guidelines adopted by Protestant churches since the Reformation, unifying appreciation for the liturgical practices of preaching and congregational singing. These guidelines require that the room, in this case the church, provides appropriate acoustic characteristics, which can be characterized by acoustic descriptors such as Reverberation Time (RT), Clarity (C80) and Definition (D50). In this article, we analyzed the acoustic quality of a protestant church whose design tried to follow these guidelines. Our findings revealed the poor quality of the acoustic environment in terms of both speech intelligibility and music. These findings emphasized the need to adopt not only Reverberation Time but also other acoustic descriptors such as Clarity and Definition in church design.
Highlights
Architectural acoustics has helped churches to achieve their liturgical goals [1]-[3]
These guidelines require that the room, in this case the church, provides appropriate acoustic characteristics, which can be characterized by acoustic descriptors such as Reverberation Time (RT), Clarity (C80) and Definition (D50)
Our findings revealed the poor quality of the acoustic environment in terms of both speech intelligibility and music
Summary
Architectural acoustics has helped churches to achieve their liturgical goals [1]-[3]. Zannin church; and 3) Musical performance by the church choir, organ or musical ensemble behind the altar or in the choir stalls [1]. To overcome these problems, Berardi [6] proposed the formulation of a parameter called “double synthetic index”. According to Berardi [6], “A double synthetic index has been defined to synthesize the acoustical properties related to the music and to the speech separately”. Based on Berardi [6], one can probably find ways to manage the different acoustic requirements. The particularities of liturgies make churches acoustically complex environments that require responses and conditions that go beyond the solutions found for concert halls, opera houses and theatres [1] [10]
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