Evaluation of the Acoustic Environment in a Protestant Church Based on Measurements of Acoustic Descriptors

摘要

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.