The church of Santa Ana in Moratalaz, Madrid, Spain (1965-1971), is an emblematic work of the architect Miguel Fisac. In his long career include interventions in the religious field, constituting one of the most important contributions to Spanish religious architecture of the last century. This church is a singular place of worship and architecturally significant, in which the acoustics played an important role in the configuration of the spatiality of the church. This paper studies the acoustic behaviour of the church and its relationship with its unique structural, spatial and coating material characteristics. The analysis of the current acoustic conditions, with high reverberation times (up to 6 seconds) and poor intelligibility on the audience, serve as the basis for making an acoustic rehabilitation proposal that contributes to improving the sound conditions of the building for the intended use, without distorting the spatial, formal and material aspects with which the architect conceived the project.
In this work, simulation techniques have been implemented to study the sound fields of a multi-configurable performance enclosure by creating computer acoustic 3D-models for each room configuration. The digital models have been tuned by means of an iterative fitting procedure that uses the reverberation times measured on site for unoccupied conditions with the orchestra shell on the stage. The initial virtual acoustic model is validated by comparing the other monaural and binaural acoustic parameters measured in the room in terms of their perception differential threshold. The procedure is applied to the Maestranza Theatre of Seville, built for the Universal Exhibition in 1992. The spatial distribution of the acoustic parameters in the audience area of the venue by measured parameters and simulation mappings enables the establishment of three zones of acoustic comfort, and are corroborated by the values of the Ando-Beranek function which provide a global quality coefficient of each zone.
Listening tests have been carried out to quantify the significance of binaural auralization over monaural auralization in accordance with the acoustic properties of the enclosure. To this end, acoustic rendering of three different rooms were generated based on synthesized monaural (two channels with the same audio material) and binaural room impulse responses. The auralizations were evaluated by means of subjective tests using headphones with non-individualized equalization. Parameters, such as localization, spatial impression and realism, were taken into consideration to determine the relevance of providing binaural information for the auralization of a given room. The analysis of the data has been conducted following a statistical approach based on ANOVA and Pearson correlation. The results indicate that spatial perception is strongly dependent on the acoustic characteristics of the rooms and on the listening condition of the audio material. Furthermore, as expected, advantages of binaural rendering in terms of source localization was also confirmed.
In parallel with research conducted using conventional methods, a uniform index method for assessing the acoustic quality of Roman Catholic churches has been developed. The latest version of the index method has been created using the index observation matrix of 12 churches which have been rated by means of the single number global index.
Assessments of the acoustic quality of any Roman Catholic church, using two calculation models: the Global Acoustic Properties Index (GAP) and the Global Index (GI), are shown in the article. The verification was performed on the example of one church, showing the way of calculating global indices to assess the acoustic quality of a new facility. The next stages in the development of the index method for assessing the acoustic quality of churches were taking into account the audience, using simulation tests and determining the spatial distribution of the single number GAP index in an examined church. An attempt to use the GAP and GI calculation models to assess the acoustic properties of some churches is also shown in the article.
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