Balancing sight and sound in heritage worship buildings

Abstract

Buildings for traditional religious gathering and time-honored worship practice require a balance of highly valued acoustical qualities such as reverberance for liturgical music, ensemble for choral singing, responsiveness for congregational participation, and clarity for intelligible speech. Geometry, dimensions, proportions, cubic volume, and boundary materials are critical elements of acoustical success. Many old European worship buildings are admired for their particularly fine blending of these criteria, and often cited as benchmarks for how buildings in the United States should look and sound. Although many heritage U.S. worship buildings look like their European precedents in terms of layout, shape, and size, a critical design element was modified, upsetting the acoustical balance. Boundary materials became lighter and thinner, making construction easier, faster, and less expensive. Acoustical upgrade of these existing buildings in the context of historic preservation/restoration brings additional design complexity, requiring equal measures of compromise from owner, users, acoustician, architect, and engineers. The acoustician's dilemma becomes “what we see may not be what we hear,” as acquired acoustical expectations are upended by actual conditions. This paper will describe these differences and explore approaches to acoustical enhancement within limitations of the buildings themselves plus further constraints of contemporary preservation practice.