ChurchIR: A Dataset of Multichannel Church Impulse Responses for Spatial Audio Applications

Spatial audio and virtual acoustics research heavily rely on measurement-based datasets of impulse responses to model and simulate real-world environments. Churches, in particular, are of significant interest due to their large, reverberant spaces and complex sound propagation characteristics. To this aim, we introduce ChurchIR, a dataset of church impulse responses acquired for spatial audio applications. The dataset has been captured using a 4th-order microphone and an omnidirectional microphone at thirty receiver positions for three different source locations. Key acoustic metrics and descriptors, including octave-band reverberation times and pseudo-spectra for source localization, are presented to characterize the dataset. ChurchIR offers researchers and developers a resource for spatial audio reproduction and analysis, providing them with data crucial for applications in immersive audio rendering, virtual reality, and architectural acoustics.