Abstract
To a first-order approximation we can place most worship services on a continuum between clarity and mystery, depending on the setting and content of the service. This liturgical space can be thought of as a combination of the physical acoustics of the worship space and the qualities of the sound created during the worship service. A very clear acoustic channel emphasizes semantic content, especially speech intelligibility. An immersive, reverberant acoustic emphasizes mystery and music. One of the chief challenges in acoustical design is the fact that both clarity and immersion are subjectively preferred by audiences, yet these two goals are almost mutually exclusive of one another. The movement along this continuum in liturgical space can also be seen in the religious contexts for many of the worship spaces constructed in the West in the last two millennia. In the case of religious ceremony, a free field acoustic environment provides more clarity and precision in the spoken word received from God and given to the congregation. Yet a diffuse field environment provides an embodied, otherworldly sense of the supernatural: the mystery of the faith received which cannot merely be put into words. This tension is perceptible in many of the religious controversies in the West during this time period. This article examines the history of the spaces used by early Western Catholic Christians as well as those of the traditions—Lutheran and Calvinist—that left the Catholic faith during the 16th century Reformation. By considering the stated goals of these traditions alongside the architectural and liturgical innovations they created, it can be seen that emergent liturgical spaces mirror the assumptions of their respective traditions regarding the proper balance between semantic and aesthetic communication during the worship service. The Reformed faiths' emphasis on the power of the Word is reflected in the liturgical space of their services, while the Catholic faith gave greater priority to the role of Mystery, in their liturgical space as well as their explicit theology. Once constructed, these spaces also aid the cultural transmission of the sung or spoken liturgy of each tradition to future generations.
Highlights
In the world of music, it is not completely true that “the medium is the message,” yet there is a complex interplay between many different media that account for the final “product” heard by the composer, a period audience, or a listener today
In the past decade greater availability and quality of computational acoustic simulation methods have given us a window into how historical spaces would have sounded in the past (Katz and Wetherill, 2005; Boren and Longair, 2011; Postma and Katz, 2015; Boren, 2019)
This essay has focused primarily on showing the correlations between theological focus and acoustical clarity, but the question of causality is much more complex: does theology necessarily lead to a change in acoustics, or vice-versa? In many of the cases, theological principles led to architectural changes without a holistic understanding of the acoustical ramifications, which themselves affected the liturgy within the same space
Summary
In the world of music, it is not completely true that “the medium is the message,” yet there is a complex interplay between many different media that account for the final “product” heard by the composer, a period audience, or a listener today. Just as an analysis of a modern pop record would be superficial without considering the reverb or final EQ on the mix, so too a consideration of historical music or a historical speech or sermon is not complete without considering the reverberation and frequency spectrum of the space in which the piece was written, as well as other factors affecting the subjective experience of a listener in the crowd Such an approach was once impractical because reconstructing a concert hall is much more timeintensive than reconstructing a period flute or viol. In the context of religious music and liturgy —perhaps more so than instrument design or ensemble size—the final link in the chain of musical production (the room) is intimately connected to the religious context of the acoustic performance spaces, many of which were constructed primarily as worship spaces rather than concert halls To show this relationship, the article first constructs a new dimension of liturgical space, which constitutes both the acoustic space as well as the clarity of liturgical content in the physical space. In each of these cases, different religious criteria were emphasized by different traditions, and these emphases can be seen in the acoustics of the spaces used by each tradition
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