From Music to Speech and Back: Early Protestant Acoustics in the Zurich Grossmünster

The Grossmünster in Zurich was central to the origins of the Swiss Reformation, in which Huldrych Zwingli stopped all music within the church: only speech was allowed during the worship services, and drastic iconoclasms removed most of the ornamentation from the interior of the church. Given the Swiss Reformation’s intense focus on words over music, acoustic impulse responses of the Grossmünster are here measured according to ISO 3382-1 and analyzed in its present empty state, which closely resembles that of the church after the 16th century iconoclasms. The reverberation time remains high and speech intelligibility in the space is poor; however, position-dependent metrics such as C80 have a high amount of variance, which may result from lower diffusion in the space given its many flat reflecting walls. It is argued that the church is more acoustically appropriate for the type of monophonic unison singing which became characteristic of Reformed worship services. Despite the abstract ideals of the early Swiss Reformers, the permanent acoustic features of the space pulled the Swiss liturgy back towards musical expression in addition to the spoken word.