Acoustic adaptation of multipurpose environments of historic buildings

In Brazil it is common for buildings belonging to the historic railway heritage to be used as rooms for multiple uses such as lectures, cinema and musical events. Some of the challenges faced during the process of adapting these spaces are: the low acoustic performance of these constructions, the lack of acoustic criteria to evaluate small or medium-sized buildings and the lack of criteria to evaluate the performance of these rooms when used for amplified music. This work studied ways to optimize the acoustic performance for the different functions that railway heritage buildings can assume. The observed parameters were: Reverberation Time (TR), Initial Decay Time (EDT), Definition (D50), Clarity (C80), Relative Sound Level (G) all in octave bands between 125Hz and 4000Hz, in addition to the Speech Transmission Index (STI). The "Isaltino Casemiro" amphitheatre located in a Brazilian city was used as an object to study suitability proposals and new evaluation criteria, through acoustic simulation with the ODEON software. The acoustic parameters were measured using the impulse response technique and Dirac software. From the set of criteria adopted, some were selected from standards such as NS8178: 2014, others were adapted from the existing literature, and some criteria were proposed.