A study on speech intelligibility of Mosque over Turkish and Arabic Language

Mosques are buildings where people of Islamic religion worship and perform rituals of speech and music. The mosque is also referred to as a multi-lingual space, since two different languages (the native language of place where the mosque is located and Arabic) are actively used during the rituals. Transferring information and performing music performances during rituals requires acoustic comfort in these spaces, which depends on speech intelligibility and clarity of music. According to the literature rewiev it has been realized that the studies on this subject are available in literature but subjective evaluation studies on the speech intelligibility are few and the mosque has not been examined as a multi-lingual place yet. Based on this finding, a comprehensive study is initiated to examine speech intelligibility in mosques through Turkish and Arabic languages using the Contemporary Turkish Mosque (C.T.M.) model sample. Within the scope of this study, all mosques built in Eskişehir since 2000 have been selected as the study area; data have been collected in terms of physical characteristics of mosque (such as size, shape, interior materials and capacity); using the comparative analysis of the data obtained the average physical properties of C.T.M. are determined and a mosque model sample is designed in accordance with the determined properties. In accordance with the specified objective and in order to determine the intelligibility of speech, in the C.T.M. model sample that provides optimum acoustic conditions recommended in the literature, oralization of the monosyllabic Turkish and Arabic words has been obtained and played to the determined group of listeners. As a result of the study, the acoustics of the sample C.T.M. have been found to be insufficient for the intelligibility of Turkish and Arabic languages. In addition, it has been concluded that the intelligibility of speech in Arabic does not change much depending on the SNR, but the opposite is true for the Turkish language.