An Acoustic Survey of the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris before and after the Fire of 2019

Abstract

The Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris is amongst the most well-known worship spaces in the world. Its large volume, in combination with a relatively bare stone construction and marble floor, leads to rather long reverberation times. The cathedral suffered from a significant fire in 2019, resulting in damage primarily to the roof and vaulted ceiling. Despite the notoriety of this space, there are few examples of published data on the acoustical parameters of this space, and these data do not agree. Archived measurement recordings from 1987 were recovered and found to include several balloon bursts. In 2015, a measurement session was carried out for a virtual reality project. Comparisons between results from these two sessions show a slight but significant decrease in reverberation time (8%) in the pre-fire state. Measurements were recently carried out on the construction site, 1 year since the fire. Compared to 2015 data, the reverberation time significantly decreased (20%). This paper presents the preliminary results of these measurements, providing a documentation of the acoustics of this historic worship space both prior to and since the 2019 fire.

Virtual Notre-Dame: Preliminary results of real-time auralization with choir members

“…linear). This is not truly the case, as was highlighted in [36]. However, for this preliminary study, it is not expected that the secondary decay will contribute significantly to the musicians performance.…”

La Vierge 2020: Reconstructing a Virtual Concert Performance Through Historic Auralisation of Notre-Dame Cathedral

“…Subsequent to the fire, access was granted to the reconstruction site and acoustic measurements were carried on 30-June-2020. The full details of the measurement method, results, and comparisons with measurements made a few decades earlier can be found in [1], [2].…”

“…For more than 850 years, Notre-Dame de Paris has been the sounding box for the city's sacred music. 1 Built to amplify the sacred word, spoken or sung, the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris is a multiform sound space with the clamor of pilgrims circulating in the ambulatory and the chanting of services protected by the choir's enclosure. The Schola singing the mass and the humming of the low masses in the radiant chapels used to coexist until today, when before the fire, the call to silence for noisy visitors, the sound of the masses, the bursts of sound from the great organs and the concerts alternated.…”

Sonic Interactions in Virtual Environments: The Egocentric Audio Perspective of the Digital Twin

“…Technologies for spatial audio rendering are now able to convey perceptually plausible simulations with stimuli that are reconstructed from real-life recordings [18] or historical archives, as for the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris before and after the 2019 fire [79], getting closer to a virtual version indistinguishable from the natural reality [77]. This is made possible by a high level of personalization in modeling user morphology and acoustic transformations caused by the human body interacting with the sound field generated in room acoustic computer simulations [17,78,114].…”