Acoustic enhancement of a modern church

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 reverberationtimeofover5s,resultinginpoorspeechcomprehension. Ascommoninworshipspaces, the acoustic improvement interventions were challenged by the denial of covering the walls and the vaultwithconventionalsound-absorbingmaterialsduetoaestheticandarchitecturalreasons. Inorder 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.