The acoustic study of the palatine chapel inside the Reggia of Caserta

The palatine chapel is part of the Reggia of Caserta, a royal palace commissioned by the King of Naples Charles III. As a very reverberant place because of its marble and hard finishes, the palatine chapel has already investigated by scholars to be one of the cultural heritage sites protected by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). On the other hand, the development of the technology during the last decades drives researchers to understand more deeply the acoustic behavior of this unique architecture. As such, an acoustic survey undertaken with the use of a spherical multichannel microphone, allowed the authors to investigate the interaction of the architectural components with the sound signal used for the impulse response (IR). The acoustic data, as traditionally shown with graphs by following the standards of ISO 3382-1, have been supported by the representation of some shots taken from a video. This overlay, realized for each source-receiver position, records the IR by overlapping the sound contour levels onto a 360° image such that the direction of arrival of the sound wave can be detected.