Acquisition and integration of spatial and acoustic features: a workflow tailored to small-scale heritage architecture

Abstract

This paper reports on an interdisciplinary data acquisition and processing chain, the novelty of which is primarily to be found in a close integration of acoustic and spatial data. It provides a detailed description of the technological and methodological choices that were made in order to adapt to the particularities of the corpus studied (interiors of small scale rural architectural artefacts) keeping in mind the backbone objective of the research: facilitate comparisons (among buildings, among spatial and acoustic features). The research outputs pave the way for proportion-as-ratios analyses, as well as for the study of perceptual aspects from an acoustic point of view. Ultimately, “perceptual” acoustic data characterised by acoustic descriptors will be related to “objective” spatial data such as architectural metrics. The experiment is carried out on a set of fifteen “small-scale” rural chapels, which is a corpus intended at fostering cross-examinations in the context of an architectural programme acting as a constant. The specificity of this corpus, in terms of architectural layout, usage, and economic or access constraints, will be shown to have had a significant impact on choices made during the acquisition and processing chains.