Acoustic simulation of the church of San Francesco della Vigna

San Francesco della Vigna is the oldest church in Venice for which there is evidence that acoustic considerations were taken into account in the architectural design. Francesco Zorzi, a humanist scholar, recommended that the church have a flat wooden coffered ceiling to improve the intelligibility of the sermons preached there. But instead of Zorzi’s recommended flat ceiling, the church was built with a plaster vault ceiling. Using measured acoustic data from the CAMERA project, a virtual model of the church was constructed in Odeon whose simulated parameters matched the measured values at different source-receiver combinations. After obtaining a good match to the measured values, this virtual model was then altered to reconstruct the flat ceiling recommended by Zorzi. This ceiling was then placed at the two different heights at which it might have been built in Zorzi’s time. The simulations show that the more absorptive ceiling might have slightly reduced the long reverberation time in the church. However, the ceiling would have been too high to make any significant change in the D50, which still remains extremely low. Thus this simulation indicates that Zorzi’s ceiling would not have made the impact on speech intelligibility he had expected.