engleski

Acoustic challenges in contemporary worship space design

Acoustic comfort is an important concept when designing spaces for people. This is especially true for worship spaces with very particular demands on acoustics, such as good intelligibility, sufficiently low noise levels and good sound quality when playing music or singing is an integral part of the religious ceremony. Worship spaces differ a lot in their sizes, volumes and shapes, thus there are many challenges in the process of acoustic design. Some of these challenges can be overcome or partly avoided with the use of auralization in the design process. Auralization is a modern tool that connects engineering work which uses numerical parameters with a real auditory experience, natural to all people. This paper gives an overview of the typical challenges found in the acoustic design of contemporary worship spaces and presents the result of a comparison of reverberation time measured in 28 Catholic churches. The compared churches were built in a wide range of time, from 13th century up to modern times, ending with several contemporary buildings. Finally, sound reinforcement systems are mentioned since they are nowadays almost always an integral part of the acoustic experience of worship spaces and are used in all ceremonies. A comparison of various sound reinforcement systems is given and typical advantages and disadvantages of these systems are discussed.

room acoustics, contemporary worship acoustics, auralization, sound reinforcement system

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