Acoustic Enhancement of a Modern Church

Abstract

This paper presents the study of the intervention for the acoustic correction of a modern church. The investigated church was built in the 1960s, with a brutalist style and with a squared plan. The hard materials, including a marble floor and hard plastered walls, were responsible for its reverberation time of over 5 s, resulting in poor speech comprehension. As common in worship spaces, the acoustic improvement interventions were challenged by the denial of covering the walls and the vault with conventional sound-absorbing materials due to aesthetic and architectural reasons. In order to carry out an adequate acoustic correction, while involving minimal interventions, the possibility of using light sound absorbing ceiling sheets was analyzed. The study is divided into three phases: Firstly, the acoustic characteristics of the current building were measured; then, new materials for adequate sound absorption were studied; finally, acoustic simulations were used to evaluate the effects on the acoustic characteristics for different intervention scenarios. The final room was able to shorten its reverberation time to about 2.0 s.

Keywords

• acoustic measurements
• room acoustics
• church acoustics
• sound absorbing materials
• acoustic modelling