Acústica de igrejas: estudos de caso da qualidade acústica em templos evangélicos com diferentes usos sonoros

Abstract

Some buildings have complex acoustic characteristics in their use, such as churches and other worship spaces. In this universe, we highlight the expressive growth of the Christianevangelical religious modality, which is expressed in activities involving music, dance, theater and spoken word at similar levels of occurrence according to the type of service performed, transforming the religious space into a scenario with varying demands to meet the spiritual sensations demanded by the user. When it comes to Brazilian standardization, the NBR 12179 (ABNT, 1992) presents reference values for the “Protestant Church” Reverberation Time (RT) without differentiating specific aspects or activities, which is a problem since this recommendation doesn’t cover the complexity these spaces and justifies the need to analyze them based on other parameters, since the variety of acoustic uses in worship implies distinct requirements of acoustic conditioning treatment. Therefore, the general objective of the research is understand the acoustic environment of two evangelical churches of different categories – traditional and experiential – in order to relate the recurrent sound uses in each example with the parameters that indicate the desirable quality to these spaces. The methodological procedures consisted of bibliographic research, case studies with measurement of objective acoustic parameters and data treatment using statistical analysis techniques. Initial results shown that experiential church, due to the occurrence of speech and music amplified by electroacoustic system at equivalent levels of importance, demands quality levels destined to low reverberant spaces like “conference rooms”, differentiating itself from the criteria commonly associated with traditional churches.