Search Results (2)

Religious practice in Serbia has taken place using both indoors and outdoors sacred sites ever since the adoption of Christianity in medieval times. However, previous archaeoacoustic research was focused on historic church acoustics, excluding the open-air soundscapes of sacred sites. The goal of this review paper is to shed light on the varieties of sacred soundscapes that have supported the various needs of Orthodox Christian practice in medieval Serbia. First, in relation to the acoustic requirements of the religious service, we compare the acoustic properties of masonry and wooden churches based on the published archaeoacoustic studies of medieval churches and musicological studies of the medieval art of chanting. Second, we provide an overview of the ethnological and historical studies that address the outdoor sacred soundscapes and investigate the religious sound markers of large percussion instruments, such as bells and semantra, the open-air litany procession that has been practiced during the annual celebration of a patron saint’s day in rural areas, and the medieval assemblies that took place on the sacred sites. This paper finally points out that the archaeoacoustic studies of sacred soundscapes should not be limited to church acoustics but also include open-air sacred sites to provide a complete analysis of the aural environment of religious practice and thus contribute to understanding the acoustic intention of medieval builders, as well as the aural experience of both clergy and laity. Full article

The acoustic analysis provides additional information on building tradition and related indoor practice that includes sound, thus deepening our understanding of architectural heritage. In this paper, the sound field of the Orthodox medieval church Lazarica (Kruševac city, Serbia) is examined. Lazarica is a representative of Morava architectural style, developed in the final period of the Serbian medieval state, when also the chanting art thrived, proving the importance of the aural environment in Serbian churches. The church plan is a combination of a traditional inscribed cross and a triconch. After the in situ measurement of acoustic impulse response using EASERA software, we built a computer model in the acoustic simulation software EASE and calibrated it accordingly. Following the parameters (reverberation time (T₃₀), early decay time (EDT) and speech transmission index (STI)), we examined the acoustic effect of the space occupancy, central dome and the iconostasis. In all the cases, no significant deviation between T₃₀ and EDT parameter was observed, which indicates uniform sound energy decay. Closing the dome with a flat ceiling did not show any significant impact on T₃₀, but it lowered speech intelligibility. The height of iconostasis showed no significant influence on the acoustics of Lazarica church. Full article