Sound quality assessment in religious temples

Case studies

Abstract

This article aims to study the acoustic quality in internal and external sound spaces of religious temples in the city of Recife/PE, presenting an evaluation that used as a methodology the accomplishment of bibliographic research to raise the main indicators of quality in these enclosures, being them: “architectural and acoustic aspects”, “aspects of building installations”, “reverberation time” and “intelligibility”. Subsequently, a comparative analysis was carried out between the indicators and the data collected in the temples studied, which were chosen as samples and presented without nominal identification, preserving the privacy of those involved. To compile and analyze the data, two spreadsheets were developed, namely: Visual Inspection and Calculation of the optimal reverberation time. The results obtained made it possible to verify that the temples studied presented nonconformity in at least one parameter of the indicators of the “architectonic and acoustic” and “building installations” aspects. Regarding the reverberation time, none of the buildings reached the parameters recommended by NBR 12179/1992, which determines noise levels for acoustic comfort. However, in the evaluation of the “volume per capita”, only temple 1 did not reach the minimum volume recommended by Carvalho (2010). With this, the present work concludes that the design of the architectural project together with the complementary project of acoustics manages to guarantee the sound quality in religious temples, improving the conditions in which the regulars and neighborhood are subjected.