Analysis of subjective acoustic measures and speech intelligibility in portuguese churches

• Autor(a) principal: Carvalho, António P. O.
• Data de Publicação: 1996
• Outros Autores: Morgado, António E. J., Henrique, Luís
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.22/8718

This study reports on subjective acoustical field measurements made in a survey of 36 Catholic churches in Portugal built in the last 14 centuries. The same group of college students were asked to judge the quality of speech and music at all the churches. Two sets of listeners in each church evaluated live music performance (cello and oboe) at two similar locations in each of the rooms using a seven-point semantic differential rating scale. An acoustical evaluation sheet was used to measure listeners overall impression of room acoustics qualities, and each of the factors that can contribute to that perception as loudness, reverberance, intimacy, envelopment, directionality, balance, clarity, echoes and background noise. Speech intelligibility tests were also given to the same group in each church. One-hundred-word lists were used in live speech tests using a theater college student as speaker. The results are graphed and analyzed by comparisons. Variations of subjective and speech intelligibility qualities were identified among the different churches and within each of the churches as well. The subjective qualities that contributed to overall acoustical impression were also identified.