People’s interactions with the environment shape their experiences. Thus, understanding these interactions is critical to enhancing human well-being. Aural attributes play a significant role in shaping the perception of space in addition to visual attributes. It is well known that sounds evoke an emotional response, but less is known about how the acoustic characteristics of environments reinforce such an emotional impact. By adopting virtual reality as a platform for recreating 3D sounds and 360° visuals of built environments of worship spaces as case studies, this study aims to investigate the influence of the acoustic environment considering audiovisual congruency on enhancing the human experience through self-report and physiological response analysis. It also examines the role of cultural background in terms of familiarity with the acoustic environment. The convergent mixed-methods approach, merging both quantitative and qualitative analysis, provides a deep understanding of the role of the acoustic environment in enhancing the auditory experience. The results show that the acoustic environment and audiovisual congruency amplify the intensity of the emotional impact, and the amplification of the impact can vary depending on the acoustic environment of the building. They also reveal that familiarity with sound and acoustic characteristics can increase this impact.

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Physical measurements of architectural acoustics do not precisely reflect the human acoustical experience in worship spaces. While many studies focus on architectural acoustics, aural architectural analysis that includes perceptual and cultural aspects, in addition to the physical aspects, and provides more comprehensive understanding of the aural experience, is afforded less attention. Worship spaces require complicated acoustical environments that allow both the hearing of sound clearly and the experiencing of sound aesthetics. This experience can create emotional effects through the perception of sound; therefore, there is the need for further study on the relationship between the qualitative and quantitative acoustical characteristics of religious buildings. This review paper provides a comparative analysis of previous studies in terms of physical, perceptual, and cultural aspects of acoustics, and further clarifies the research gap in this area. Finally, it recommends strategies for studying the aural experience in worship spaces through the interaction between the cultural influence that affects how a specific sound is perceived, and the architectural elements that change acoustical parameters, thus playing an important role in the perception of the sound in the space.

Room modes are the resonances that result from generating a sound in a room. The sound coloration produced by these modes is often deemed problematic. Research in room acoustics continues to refine our means to control this coloration for reconciling visual and aural variables in architectural design. Alvin Lucier demonstrated the resonant frequencies of a room in his sound art piece “I am sitting in a room” by recording his speech in a space then playing the recording and re-recording it in the same room multiple times until the resonant frequencies of the room became dominant. Inspired by Lucier’s work, this research explores the possibilities that can emerge from replicating the same iterative process within a simulated framework. Accordingly, a room is modeled, an impulse response (IR) is generated and an auralization is created by convolving an anechoic recording with the IR. The output is then used as an input that is convolved again with the same IR. This method is similar to the method used in artificial reverberation to control the feedback loops of PA systems and is expected to advance room acoustic analysis. This paper discusses the benefits and limitations of the proposed method with possible applications.