The influence in the churches' acoustic promoted by the guidelines of the Vatican Council II: case study

• Grant number: 12/00985-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Master's degree
• Effective date (Start): March 20, 2012
• Effective date (End): July 19, 2012
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Architecture and Town Planning
• Principal Investigator: Stelamaris Rolla Bertoli
• Grantee: Roberta Smiderle
• Supervisor: Paola Ricciardi
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Engenharia Civil, Arquitetura e Urbanismo (FEC). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Research place: Università degli Studi di Pavia, Italy
• Associated to the scholarship: 10/04344-8 - The acoustics of the Catholic churches in Campinas: since the founding of the city till the present days., BP.MS

Abstract

The Catholic Church bases its ceremonies and celebrations on documents written after agreements and meetings. These guidelines propose to adapt the church for the rituals, according to the period and society, aiming to reach a largest congregation. The buildings can't have their configuration renewed after each new guideline, so adaptations are done in order to let the space adequate for new needs. The study proposed by this research refers to an acoustical analysis of a few churches, comparing the method of celebrating the mass before and after the Vatican Council II, occurred on 1964. After this Council aiming to avoid the dispersion of the faithful, the mass started to be prayed on vernacular language and with the priest facing the congregation instead of the altar. Thus, the speech could be better understood by people regardless of their studies and knowledge. After that, the priest who was praying facing the altar was repositioned for a place closer to the assembly in the main chapel. The aim of this research is to study if and how the repositioning of the main sound source (priest) affected the acoustical performance of the building. For this study two churches have been chosen: church N. Sra. Do Carmo and church São Paulo Apóstolo, built respectively before and after the guidelines of the Vatican Council II. With an impulse technique, measurements have been done concerning the frequency for the parameters of reverberation time (RT), early decay time (EDT) definition (D50), clarity (C80) and speech transmission index (STI). Several positions were chosen for sound sources and receivers. The result analysis will be done in cooperation with researchers from the Laboratory of Technical Physics in the University of Pavia, Italy. Aiming to establish with these results how the repositioning of the main sound source inside the church has affected the acoustical performance in the congregation area, for both architectural styles. After this study, the same method of analysis is intended to be used for other churches studied in Campinas, SP. (AU)