Unveiling the acoustics of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela using 3D impulse responses

摘要

The Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Spain is the arrival point of hundreds of thousands of pilgrims that every year get to the city along the many paths of the "Camino de Santiago". Along with the oldest part of the city, the cathedral is listed as UNESCO World Heritage, and several restoration works have been done and still are under way. Its acoustics is the result of centuries of evolution since the original Romanesque building was started, with contributions from nearly every architectural style. The interior arrangement of the church is significantly different from the majority of Spanish cathedrals, where the choir typically breaks the main nave creating many sub-spaces. Here the plan follows the Latin cross shape that allows the pilgrims to look at the altar from nearly everywhere, allowing source-receiver distances up to 70m. An acoustic survey that involved different laboratories allowed the collection of monaural, binaural, and B-format impulse responses in different source-receiver combinations. In the present paper, the results pertaining to B-format measurements are presented, discussing the spatial distribution of the acoustic parameters as a function of the directional pattern of the reflection and of the energy distribution among the different spaces of the church.