Cathedral acoustics: Bristol Cathedral as a case study

The acoustic environment of a cathedral is essential to its character, and part of its intangible cultural heritage, and therefore must be studied, preserved, and disseminated. This paper presents the acoustic study of Bristol cathedral, serving as a case study to detail the procedure followed to analyse the acoustic field of English cathedrals as part of the EC-funded Marie-Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship Cathedral Acoustics . The acoustic characterisation includes an in-depth analysis of the different sound sources involved in both present and past uses of the cathedral, as well as the review of the acoustically significant architectural changes throughout history. Acoustic measurements were used to capture the Room Impulse Responses (RIR) of the space at several source-receiver combinations. The measured RIR have been used to describe the current acoustic behaviour of this highly reverberant space and to create auralisations based on specific speech and singing extracts which form part of liturgical practices and cultural celebrations held in the cathedral. The sound extracts used for the auralisations were previously recorded in an anechoic environment.