A few dB in overall level can make a significant difference between, “Turn that Down or I'm leaving!” and, “Can you turn it up in the back? We can't hear the Pastor.”
Friday, September 01, 2017
Now Hear This! A Critical Look at Loudness
A few dB in overall level can make a significant difference between, “Turn that Down or I'm leaving!” and, “Can you turn it up in the back? We can't hear the Pastor.”
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
I have direct experience working with church sound. I just recently completed an install of a new wireless mic system for a church that is over 100 years old. It was not the easiest, but also not as difficult. The real difficulty comes when you try to adjust for the people who will be doing the speaking. Some of the other factors that the author misses here are about the style of architecture that a building can have a wildly varying effect on the sound. A sanctuary with carpet will sound much different than one with a stone floor. The size of the space, how it was designed and built will all have to come into the discussion, not just how loud or soft the music or speaking is. The same level of sound will be completely different in a place like Lakewood Church in Houston TX versus the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. While one was a former basketball arena and not built for vocal amplification, the other, a much older structure was built in a way that allowed vocal sound to travel without microphones. In any sound design, there are more than 100 factors to consider when doing something simple as adjusting the volume on a mic. What sounds good to one will be nails on a blackboard to another.
To confess, I haven't been to any church for the past decade. So I wouldn't know anything about the current technologies used in churches. But looking back to when I was a regular attendee, it amazes me how I never thought about the sound engineering behind the sermons and music. Actually, the fact that a church could be a big customer for live entertainment business has never crossed my mind until very recently. Acknowledging that the secular and sacred do coexist, the church must be a very difficult place to please the talent and the audience as mentioned in the article. Not only because the age range of the audience members is wide and because the spaces may not be ideal for optimal sound quality, but because the talents probably do not know what is the best for them. Like in any other live entertainment business, people managing could be the most difficult matter.
For me this article brought up the point that sound is literally in everything we do. Anything that needs to be broadcasted to more than a small group of people, probably has sound involved. It’s not just large scale theatrical performances, or concerts, or symphonies, or movies and film that use sound design, but it is also churches. I have never thought about the sound design of a church, but they are really doing the same thing as a play. They are trying to get a message to a group of people using dialogue. This article showed me how important the sound is to any audience no matter how the information is being presented.
Post a Comment