Common Church Acoustic Problems & How to Identify Them

Church sounds like a gymnasium.

 
This is typical of a situation where there is too much reverberation being generated within the room. These rooms have a very high constant noise level (the noise floor), and that makes it difficult to do much of anything in these rooms comfortably. It is usually due to the room being very large, with a lot of volume. These rooms store acoustic energy very well, and lack adequate absorption on the surfaces of the walls or ceiling. A commonly used solution is to add acoustics well distributed over the upper half of the room's surface, but doing this alone won't turn the gym sound into a practical sanctuary or fellowship hall. Instead, speech intelligibility needs to guide the acoustic design of a church. Normally, sound comes from one place, the loud speakers, but it still goes nearly everywhere. The acoustic plan to improve speech in an overly reverberant church is to keep sound from going anywhere else in the room, except towards the congregation.
 

Minister's speech is hard to understand.

 
This is what happens when too much sound is going in the wrong direction. The pastor's voice seems to lack articulation in the lower tones, and there is a mumbling character to the voice. The church may have bought a new sound system and changed things a little--but overall, just as bad as before. Female speakers might be easier to understand. This is normally due to slap echoes that interfere with listening. If you sit in back, there might be no echo but the sound is difficult to understand. If you sit in front, the sound may be loud enough, but the echo makes a mess of things. Sitting in the middle is usually better, but you are limited to available seats. This situation can normally be resolved by performing an analysis of the space, identifying the areas where slap echo is developing and applying the necessary acoustics to eliminate them.
 

Congregation members feel like that are singing alone and the music is un-involving.

 
It is hard to sing alone, especially when there are people standing all around you, listening. Sometimes congregational singing can feel like that. And when it does, most people will sing quieter. When they do, the sound in the room gets even quieter and people feel even more exposed and shy. The choir sounds may sound thin as would the piano. There is no reverberation, no aliveness to the congregational part of the church. Where did the sound go. The sheer volume of the room eats up some of the sound, absorption eats up the rest. Look around, most likely, the floor is carpeted, and/or the pews have soft fabric pads, comfortable for sitting but bad for singing-on top of this the ceiling is 50' overhead. No wonder, there is no acoustic support for singing. Although difficult, this can be addressed by redirecting and diffusing sound back into the congregation with the appropriate acoustic devices.
 

Choir can't hear one another when singing.

 
After choir practice, a few singers stay behind, gather into a group and start really singing a favorite song. Look at them and you'll always see them standing in a circle, facing each other. That is the natural way for people to sing. But come Sunday, there they are, standing upright in straight wide rows, one behind the other. It isn't natural, but it's traditional--that's how the choir performs. And what's worse, the men with their bass voices are up in the back and the women with their higher range voices are down front. A man's voice can be heard behind him but women's voices tend to be a lot more directional and project to where they face. The guys in the back row cannot hear the gals in the front row, and have a hard time hearing what is going on up front. In this situation, very little of the choir's own sound is being stored nearby for them to benefit from. It is all being projected too quickly out and away into the expanse of the sanctuary. This can be improved however, with proper acoustic devices being placed in key areas near the choir area.
 

Praise band doesn't sound clear and plays too loud.

 
What happens when you are sitting in a normally quiet restaurant, and a large noisy group comes in? They are all having fun, laughing loud, and yelling to the far ends of the table. Soon, all the people at the tables around them, need to talk louder to hold conversations. Then the tables next to those people do the same, until the noise floor of the whole restaurant becomes almost unbearable. No one thought about putting the group into a separate 'party room', instead it forced everyone to compete to be heard. That is what is happening with the praise band, it really is a rock band, one of the loudest inhabited placed on earth. And musicians need to hear each other in order to stay in sync. What the praise band does is add personal monitors to play their sound back to themselves, so they can hear over the rest of the on-stage noise. That brings more noise on-stage, so the monitors have to be turned up even more. It becomes a battle to hear. The best way to resolve this is to reduce the on-stage noise floor, so that the musicians can hear themselves and each other better. By adding the appropriate acoustics on and around the stage this problem can be greatly reduced.
 

Fellowship hall is too noisy to have comfortable conversations and people don't stay around.

 
If you are lonely at a party, you'll stay long enough to put in a showing but soon after, you'll just leave. That is what happens in noisy fellowship halls because noise isolates people from one another. When a room is too noisy, people have to raise their voices to talk even across the table, and they resort to reading lips. The louder they talk, the louder everybody else has to talk. After a while, it gets so loud that when someone says something, you don't understand but you will just smile and nod in agreement. If you shout "What? I can't hear you!" then you will just end up with someone shouting his or her casual comment in your ear. A room needs a balance of sound power. It needs to have as much sound absorbing power as the people in it have sound generating power. Unfortunately, people easily generate more sound with their mouths than they provide absorption with their bodies and clothes. The room acoustic has to make up for the rest.