Acoustics of Worship Spaces

Experience in the last several years has indicated that worship environments can have both high speech intelligibility and high reverberation time. This may be accomplished by architectural means in some situations, but often electronic reinforcement systems are required. There are six basic types of such systems: (1) central, (2) dual central, (3) overhead distributed, (4) pewback, (5) overhead directional distributed, and (6) column distributed, each suited to a specific architectural‐acoustical problem. With regard to music, relationships between the choir, organ, and congregation are equally important in the high‐reverberation‐time cathedral‐like spaces and the smaller, more intimate environments. Many aspects important in the over‐all design will be discussed and examples will be given.