Acoustic exploration inside the mosque of Sidi Soufi in Bejaia, Algeria

The majority of Algerian mosques, old or contemporaneous, have not been studied under an acoustic perspective. Sidi Soufi is one of the oldest mosques in the town of Bejaia, built in the XVI
^th
century during the reign of the Hafsids, and rebuilt during the French colonisation. The prayer room has a rectangular plan, composed of six naves of 3,80m each facing the qibla wall, and three spans (one central and two lateral), with a height of 6m. The side walls are punctuated by twin windows composed of an overstepped semicircular horseshoe arch, which illuminate the room, in addition to the dome and the skylight. This paper deals with the determination of acoustic proprieties of the prayer room of Sidi Soufi’s Mosque though acoustic measurements, which were carried out according to ISO 3382-1 standard, in unoccupied conditions, and by placing an omnidirectional sound source close to the Mihrab.