The Comparative Analysis of Acoustic Properties of Roman Catholic Churches Using the Index Method

Development of the index method for acoustic assessment of Roman Catholic churches is presented in the article. The current version of the global index was developed on the grounds of studies conducted in 8 churches and was based on 4 partial assessment indices: reverberation, music sound, speech intelligibility, and external disturbances. The use of sound strength as another partial index for global assessment is proposed in the article. A new formula of the global index for assessment of the acoustic quality of Roman Catholic churches is proposed. The computational procedure of the global index which uses analytical tools such as singular value decomposition (SVD) and comparative multivariate analysis (CMA) resulted from studies and analyses performed on an index observation matrix that was larger than before. Verification of index assessment was carried out for a sample of 12 Roman Catholic churches.