Project AURA: acoustic simulation of theatre halls - from digital survey to virtual reconstruction

The issue of acoustics is an increasingly debated topic in the fields of digital documentation and Cultural Heritage preservation, especially in contexts such as theater halls, churches, and auditoriums. These acoustic characteristics change over time and thus contribute to structuring the historical memory of a place, playing a fundamental role in the perception and fruition of the built environment. Indeed, the acoustics of an architecture is an intangible consequence of its construction and the design choices made on the materials and furnishing systems that will constitute the truly tangible elements of the Architectural Heritage. On these theoretical aspects has thus moved the European project AURA – Auralisation of Acoustic Heritage Sites Using Augmented and Virtual Reality, co-funded since 2021 by Creative Europe, whose aim is to explore the potential of auralization – a technique for simulating the acoustics of a given place within models – by combining it with the three-dimensional-visual representations of the virtual environment based on accurate digital surveys. For this purpose, three emblematic European case studies were thus examined – the Konzerthaus in Berlin (DE), the Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in Florence (IT) and the Opera and Ballet Theater in Lviv (UA) – for each of which an appropriate methodology dedicated to digitization and virtual reconstruction was conceived, with the aim of obtaining reliable assets on which subsequent auralization processes could be set and, following these, to develop multisensory, reliable and high-performance 3D models both in terms of graphic rendering and virtual fruition, and in terms of acoustic simulation.