Speaker
Description
Mosques are multilingual spaces in non-Arabic countries. These mosques require intelligible speech in multiple languages, including the languages spoken by the majority of the population in the country and Arabic. For instance in Türkiye, speech should be intelligible in both Arabic and Turkish. Speech intelligibility in enclosures is mainly influenced by reverberation time (RT) and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). In the literature it is evident that languages are affected by RT and SNR differently. Additionally, due to the sacred nature of mosques, a divine feeling should be present by strong late reflections at certain frequencies. Therefore, early and reflections in mosques should be adequate for each language spoken in the enclosure, while maintaining divine feeling with strong late reflections at specific frequencies. This hypothesis requires multi-layered analysis of field measurements of room acoustic parameters, acoustic simulations and listening tests to achieve an optimization between multilingual speech intelligibility and divine feeling. This paper presents the first phase of an extensive research project. In this phase, our aim was to reveal the effects of dome geometry on speech intelligibility; therefore, we analyzed the difference of acoustic characteristics between domed and non-domed mosques. We conducted field measurements in Mogan Lake Mosque in Ankara, which is a unique example of non-domed mosques, followed by computer simulations evaluating an alternative multi-dome configuration of the same mosque. The results of the study will reveal the contribution of dome geometry to speech intelligibility in mosques.