This second post on acoustics and music-making in churches features an article by the late Richard Proulx in the first-ever GIA Quarterly magazine issue. It eloquently (if somewhat cantankerously*) lays out the basic problems and solutions. (Spoiler: carpet is never the solution.)

Click here to see the first post on acoustics in churches.

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Singing on Alien Ground

Richard Proulx

Wall-to-wall carpet. Padded pews. Acoustical tile. Acoustical plaster. Absorbent wall panels. Soft, rough-sawn wood. All designed to muffle, stifle, deaden sound.

There is growing concern among thoughtful liturgists and musicians regarding the crisis of unworkable acoustical environments being created in both new and renovated churches in this country. With evident purposefulness and at great expense, we continue to design and renovate worship spaces where members of the assembly hear themselves sing and pray only as isolated and detached individuals rather than as part of a unified community. Has the Church only been kidding when asking repeatedly for strong community participation? Have liturgists not been serious about a “ministry of the assembly”? When musicians’ cries for more careful acoustical consideration go unheeded, why are they then blamed for failing to produce strong congregational song?

Floors and “the bottom line.”  Carpets divide people and destroy community in worship. The perception that wall-to-wall carpets provide “cozy warmth”—once considered a domestic luxury of having “arrived”—has a price in both liturgical involvement and long-term stewardship.

People tend to sing louder and better when they hear their voices clearly magnified, which is why some of us like to sing in the shower, underneath bridges, or in other resonant places. Rooms which “give back the sound” when people sing or read greatly enhance and encourage congregational participation.

One practical function of the floor surface is to conduct sound from one location of the building to another. While we often think of air as being the medium for sound, it is actually the floor, or air immediately above the floor, which amplifies the sound of voices and conducts it evenly throughout the entire worship space. (Electricity travels in the same way: over, not inside of, wire.) It is easy to see, therefore, how material used in floor treatment can either improve or reduce the efficiency of sound transmission. For community singing, this can be a critical factor.

Worship leaders, especially clergy and musicians, should occasionally test their acoustical perception by sitting in the midst of the assembly as members of the community itself. Sonic perspective gained only from sanctuary and choir loft are usually incomplete and imaginary. Experiencing the congregation’s vantage point can produce a fresh, even shocking, sense of reality about sound and sight, as well as many other things! Unfortunately, few clergy or musicians are willing to subject themselves to this practical, revealing exercise.

Unlike stone, wood, or other permanent materials, carpets always need to be replaced. Holes, tears, incense burns, salt from icy winter streets—all impact on the durability of even the most expensive floor fabrics.

At a time of heightened stewardship awareness throughout our parishes, initial investment in solid, permanent floor materials are better long-term bargains than materials which require periodic replacement. That is sound management and good stewardship.

Doctrine of electronic reinforcement.  For church architects, floor treatment is an expensive design headache. Carpet is the expedient solution for cutting design and construction costs, even though architects know that replacement will be necessary, Ironically, both corporate and domestic architecture now favor hardwoods or ceramic tiles for floor treatment, and the crafts involved in producing them are enjoying a renaissance everywhere except in churches.

Once a worship space has had its natural acoustic muffled or amputated, attempts at “correction” via massive electronic reinforcement become essential for all “performers”: presider, lectors, cantor, choir, and instrumentalists. Rather than provide here subtle enhancement for clarity, sophisticated systems with computerized time-delay are required in dead spaced to bring the booming voice of The Electronic Church to the remotest corners of padded parish centers. This simulating of outdated recording studio techniques leaves out the most critical “performer” of all: the congregation, which must struggle with its role unamplified, unreinforced. Shall we also now provide each member of the community with body mike and earphones to electronically synthesize a corporate song? A poor, unworkable acoustic for worship demonstrates poor theology at the most practical level.

A challenging mandate.  Since worship spaces have acoustical requirements and goals unlike those of other public buildings, it is critical that those responsible for redesigning and reviewing plans be diligent in compiling all available information necessary to make informed responsible decision.

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Originally published in GIA Quarterly magazine, issue 1:1. ©1990 by GIA Publications, Inc.

*This issue makes me cantankerous too.

In the past couple of weeks I’ve talked with people facing a dilemma, and a real hindrance to their ability to perform their ministry well: the committees, architects, and pastoral staffs at their churches have built and installed whole new designs (or renovations) for worship spaces and/or sound systems–without ever once speaking with the musicians about the particular needs of their ministry.

This is a subject near to my heart, and it has been ever since my very first parish job, where I started just as the renovation of the church building began. I got there just in time to prevent them from irrevocably forcing the piano into a completely unusable spot, but I was too late, or too young, or too new, to save the choir loft.  Apparently some nice parishioner who owned a carpeting business had donated carpet to the church, and one of the associate pastors had in the past gotten annoyed when the choir members shuffled pages and talked to one another during the liturgy (I told him, “I can put a stop to that, really.” He didn’t believe me.) and he deliberately wanted the sound tamped down up there.  Plus, the carpet would be provided and installed free of charge. I said, “but it will absorb all the sound!” He said, “But we will have microphones!” I was 22. I lost. And it basically meant that, in this beautifully renovated space, the choir, singing from a lovely rear-of-church loft that should have sent the sound right down the nave and supported the people’s singing beautifully, was only audible through the speakers. Broke my heart. (Fortunately, a couple of decades later when the ancient held-together-with-chewing-gum-and-duct-tape* organ–which somehow was left out of the renovation, another really sad omission–was replaced, a nice hardwood floor was installed up there, so that space is now at last what it should have been ages ago.)

Even more important, though,** it is crucial that everyone involved realizes that we are not designing for a theater space, or a classroom, or a lounge, or a lobby…in all of these scenarios, the goal of the sound designer is to make sure the sound transfer is clear from the front, or the speaker, or the leader, or what-have-you, and damped down where the “audience” or “listeners” or “crowd” are located. But as we all know, there is no audience at liturgy. Even when we talk about “the choir” as being that group standing and singing together in the beautiful non-carpeted musician space, we are missing the point, because the assembly is the primary choir of the liturgy. If we are committed to fostering assembly song, we need to make it possible, even easy, for them to do so. Carpets, padded pews, sound absorbing wall tiles, low ceilings–all of these contribute to the individual assembly member being acoustically isolated from the people around them, and feeling as though they are the only person singing. When individuals don’t hear anyone singing around them, they are inevitably quick to fade out themselves, and the vicious cycle continues, and the assembly forgets its own voice.

In the coming months, I will be devoting some blog space a few articles I’ve located in the GIA archives on this subject, simply because I know a lot of people have questions and concerns. Most of the questions I hear boil down to this: “I know this is important, I know carpet is bad and over-miking is bad and reflective surfaces are good. Can you please give me some advice, resources, documents, and data, so I can take this information to the pastor/committee/builder?” (Click here for the second installment, Richard Proulx’s article “Singing on Alien Ground.”)

So, a few nuts and bolts:

1. The first consideration in any acoustical situation needs to be the acoustic of the room you’re working with. Saying, “Well, the room has this problem, let’s fix it with the sound system” is usually going to be wasteful and self-defeating, because a flawed room won’t get the best out of your sound system either–remember, your sound system is working within whatever acoustic you give it; the electronic sound and the natural acoustic sound will have to work together. Fix the room first. The better the acoustics in the room you create or alter, the less work (and money!) will be required of your sound system.
2. Perhaps your room is too live, and needs a little absorption of the sound. Carpet is not the answer. The hard reflective surfaces should be right around the space where the sound is generated (i.e. where people are speaking/singing). If any absorption needs to happen, it should happen far away from your singing assembly, preferably as many feet above their heads, as is possible.
3. Shape and size of the room matter a lot. Long narrow rooms with high ceilings make it easy for sound to travel along the long axis; fan-shaped rooms are much trickier and introduce new challenges–but they are challenges worth taking the time and effort to address. (You can’t just “fix” these challenges with a sound system; see #1.)
4. Ceiling height is almost as important as the overall shape of the room. For sound to travel well, you need significant space over people’s heads.
5. Perhaps most important: your sound consultant must be someone who understands the unique needs of a room that supports assembly song. Studio-type sound-equipment engineers have been known to come into a room and say, in essence, “okay, let’s dampen and absorb ALL of the natural acoustic of the room, and then we have complete control and can replace it with a well-placed sound system.” If your engineer says anything even faintly like this…run away, because it means they do not understand the needs of your space or your liturgy.
6. This last one is neither a nut nor a bolt, nor anything I researched; it is a Jennifer musing, but I think it might still be helpful. We know that (excepting of course the electronic consistency of digital keyboards and such) every piano is unique and a little different from every other; every organ has its own personality and character; every guitar has its own sound and tone color. They are not animate objects, but each is unique and possesses its own voice and resonance, and they are the instruments with which we make music. The room in which we make music is also part of the music-making. The room is the resonating chamber for the voice of the people of God as they sing. To be cold and clinical about 4 walls and a ceiling is to miss the point. The room makes music with you. Make it your ally, your partner, your friend, and the music will show it.

Here also are a few notes from the liturgical documents, in case anyone needs solid documentation to bring to a committee: Sing to the Lord has a solid section about acoustics in churches, starting in paragraph 101. It doesn’t address sound systems per se; it seems to take the opinion that in a well-designed acoustically sound room there will not be much need for amplification, but that if there is, it should not overpower:

One final, happy story.

My current place of part-time work and worship has just been blessed to open a new space. We are a large community that on many Sundays just can’t fit everyone into the church, so for years we have been holding “overflow” liturgies in the church basement, where there wasn’t even enough space for the additional people; we have now just moved into a new building, one with a large community space designed and created to be flexible and usable for many kinds of events, but with regular worship as a key piece.

Way back when this all started, all the department heads were invited to a meeting in which the decisions that had been made would be presented so we would all know what was happening. One of those decisions was that the new floor would be carpeted.

I had fore-warning of this, so I went in armed and ready. I had articles, I had figures, I had arguments and counter-arguments, and most of all I had an understanding of the issues. I calmly and articulately was able to shift the conversation from “how will we keep the carpet clean” to “perhaps another flooring type would work better.” I was able to talk about the big points I noted above, I was able to talk about the need for the reflective surfaces around the singing people, and when they showed me their calculations for exactly how much absorption the room would need (it’s basically a giant math problem; it was really kind of cool!), I was able to steer them to placing those absorptive materials up at higher spaces in the big room, so the sound would not get out of hand but the space where people sing would be appropriately reflective.

At the end of the meeting, the architect looked at me slightly aghast, and said, “Why haven’t we been talking with you all along about this? We had no idea. This changes everything.”

The space is beautiful. There is no carpet. This Sunday I will get to find out how it works with a real live assembly…I can’t wait.

–Jennifer

*I’m kidding about the chewing gum, but not the duct tape…the blower was literally held together with duct tape.

**To be clear: not putting carpet in your choir lofts is pretty darned important! Do. Not. Carpet. The. Music. Area.