When fire engulfed the famed Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, France in 2019, it took with it not just the cathedral’s artefacts and paintings, but also its voice. While work is on to restore the cathedral, bringing back its legendary acoustics might not be an easy task.
What is this voice?
The cathedral’s voice is nothing but the reverberations in the cathedral. As Notre-Dame is a large and hard space, it has very long reverberations with full and rich sound. Before the fire, the reverberation time was about six to eight seconds. The tap of a heel, the sound of a clap or a cough would hang in the air for seconds together. People were forced to stay silent, unless they wanted everyone inside to hear what they were discussing.
This unique voice belongs not just to Notre-Dame, but to several majestic buildings around the world.
How does it sound now?
Not great. The fire destroyed parts of the ceiling. What was once a closed structure, now has three big holes. Apart from this, there’s no seating in the cathedral and there’s lots of dust, thanks to the cleaning work. All this has had an impact on the reverberations in the cathedral. It does not sound the same as it used to right before the fire.
Can its lost voice be brought back?
Acoustics researchers feel it is possible to bring back Notre-Dame’s voice. However, a lot of it depends on the kind of material being used to rebuild the cathedral. Not to mention how the acoustics of the cathedral have changed over its years of existence.
Brian Katz, an acoustics researcher at CNRS, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, and Sorbonne University in Paris, his colleague Mylene Pardoen, a soundscape archaeologist, and their team have managed to digitally reproduce the building’s reverberance using computer simulation and acoustic measurements that the team had taken in 2013. Katz aims to use this work to help understand how choices made during reconstruction can affect how the cathedral sounds.
Katz can also help restore the sound to how it was when the cathedral was built. However, how Notre-Dame sounds now depends entirely on the work of the researchers and the team tasked with rebuilding the cathedral.
Picture Credit : Google
