Muqarnas as diffusers

Claim (verbatim)

Muqarnas as diffusers. Muqarnas — the honeycomb vaulting of Islamic architecture, thousands of small stepped niches filling domes and squinches — is usually read as pure geometry made ornament. But a surface of many differently sized and angled cells is exactly what a modern acoustician builds when designing a diffuser: irregular relief at multiple scales scatters reflections in all directions, smoothing out the focused echoes and flutter that a hard smooth dome throws back at the floor. The conjecture is that muqarnas has this measurable acoustic function: compared with smooth domes of equal size and geometry, muqarnas-vaulted spaces should show a measurably more even reverberant field for recitation — fewer focused echoes, smaller spatial variance in decay — precisely the qualities that flatter the recited word. Paired measurements in Iranian mosques would show the ornament earning its keep: decoration that is also engineering.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

For matched pairs of Iranian mosque spaces — one muqarnas-vaulted, one smooth-domed, of comparable size and geometry — measure impulse responses across a grid of listener positions and compute the spatial variance of decay metrics (EDT, RT60) and focused-echo indicators. Primary clause: the muqarnas space shows lower spatial variance of decay and fewer detected focused echoes than its smooth-domed counterpart in at least three-quarters of pairs. The verdict follows the primary clause.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

paired measurements in Iranian mosques.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The core join is directly published: a computational study (Al Jumaily 2017, full-text-confirmed by the dossier) models muqarnas configurations as sound-scattering elements and concludes they improve the hearing state, and an in-mosque measurement study at the Yazd Jaame mosque reports lower reverberation time with muqarnas/squinch configurations (median RT ~3.33s vs ~4.32s without). The harvest's exact falsification design (paired comparison against a smooth dome of identical geometry) was not confirmed as performed, but ornament-with-acoustic-function is established.

• Al Jumaily 2017, 'Muqarnas form efficiency in diffusing Sound waves within the Space', IJISET 4(12) — Direct simulation study (full text confirmed)
• 'The effects of muqarnas and mortar joints on the acoustic quality of the Jaame mosque of Yazd' — In-mosque RT measurements (snippet-cited; 403)

Predictions

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