Sacred Sound and Space: A Cross-Cultural Quantitative Study of Music–Architecture Acoustic Matching
Keywords:
music, architecture, religionAbstract
Religious music is rarely experienced in isolation. It is embedded within architectural spaces that shape how sound is perceived and understood. Scholars have long suggested an intimate relationship between sound and space in religious contexts but primarily explored through qualitative approaches. The results of this study indicate musical features significantly relate to architectural acoustics only under conditions of cultural matching by estimating interaction-based regression models. These findings provide quantitative evidence for the co-evolution of sacred sound and space and offer a new approach to studying the acoustic dimension of religious experience.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Alina Yang (Author)
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