THE ACOUSTICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SAYYIDINA ABU BAKAR MOSQUE, UTeM

Abstract

In the Muslim world, mosques are built with grandeur architectural design to depict an important house of worship in Islam. Unfortunately the acoustical performance in mosque is rarely considered at the design stage which eventually deteriorates the speech intelligibility. This includes the Sayyidina Abu Bakar Mosque in UTeM where poor subjective speech clarity is experienced during congregation. The objective of this paper is to discuss the acoustical characteristics of the mosque. The CATT indoor acoustic software was used to calculate important room acoustic parameters such as reverberation time (RT) and clarity (C50). The measurement was conducted to validate the RT from the simulation where good agreement is obtained. This study finds that the Sayyidina Abu Bakar Mosque UTeM has poor acoustical performance at low frequencies below 1 kHz, i.e. the frequency range which is significantly responsible for the speech intelligibility

Keywords

• Acoustics
• Mosque
• Speech intelligibility
• Reverberation time