Built to be heard

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, March 31st. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: the art and science of church acoustics.

Music in church can spark strong opinions. But before style comes something more basic: how the room actually sounds.

WORLD’s Jenny Rough reports on how acoustics shape what we hear and how we worship.

SOUND: [honking horn]

ANDY MORGAN: So we’re at the corner of East 91st Street and Lexington Avenue.

JENNY ROUGH: Andy Morgan lives and works in New York City. A place he describes as very, very loud.

SOUND: [Noisy New York]

That’s the last thing most people want to hear in church. And although churches do consider acoustics, it’s usually too late.

MORGAN: It’s usually after the design is already done that they sort of come back and say, "Okay, now what do we do about the acoustics and the sound system?"

Morgan is an acoustics consultant. He designs indoor spaces to enhance desired sounds and reduce obtrusive ones

MORGAN: Every time I tell a Christian what I do, they almost always tell me, "Oh, I got to this great church and we just built this new building, and we love it all, except the acoustics are terrible!"

He worked on Redeemer East Side, a presbyterian church on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. As soon as we step inside, the city sounds disappear. He walks towards the sanctuary. 

MORGAN: Well, everything in there has got to be quiet. 

Even the church lobby is quiet.

SOUND: [Subway approaching]

MORGAN: One of the main subway lines in the city is right outside. We don’t want to hear that.

And inside, you can’t, thanks to deliberate design choices.

When he planned the sanctuary, he had to keep in mind that this particular church offers a mix of services.

MORGAN: In the morning, they do a traditional service, so there's an organ. 

SOUND: [Organ music]

MORGAN: So they do mostly hymns.

Organs tend to require large open spaces. Think of a historic cathedral.

MORGAN: You want a highly reverberant space where the sound really echoes around and you feel like you’re enveloped in that organ sound.

But the evening service is totally different—

WORSHIP LEADER: How y'all doing? Welcome to worship. [Singing Desert Song]

And that required other needs.

MORGAN: You want a really nice sound system and a really dead room so you just hear exactly what’s coming out of the speakers without the room changing it.

Morgan had to consider how to create a space where both those styles sound good.

MORGAN: The walls in this room are all fabric, but most of them actually are on hard plywood backing. So it looks fuzzy [knocks walls] but actually acoustically, it’s hard. So some of these panels selectively have different material behind them to absorb sound where we want it to, insulation, fiberglass insulation, which is very highly sound absorbing. 

Morgan has always liked music. After college, he took a job with a company that specialized in acoustics for concert halls, theaters, and opera houses. Then, seven years ago, he started his own firm.

MORGAN: Part of the reason is because I wanted to do a lot more work for churches.

In concert halls and theaters, the sound has to go only one way: out from the performer to the listeners. Churches present a unique challenge.

MORGAN: In a church it’s different because the people in the pews are actively participating. We have to think about the people in the pews hearing each other. 

Another layer of complexity? The emphasis on preaching and liturgy.

MORGAN: In a church, you’ve got the music and then you’ve got the spoken word right next to each other and they both have to sound good, and usually they want pretty opposite things acoustically.

Morgan has worked with all sorts of denominations. Some have big choirs, others guitars, or drums, or no instruments at all.

Redeemer East Side purchased what used to be an apartment complex.

JOSH RIDER: So in New York, it's a very, it's a vertical city.

That’s Josh Rider. He’s the architect who worked with Morgan.

RIDER: So you have to build a church that used to be an apartment building into a vertical rectangle. And so you’re really seeing the edges of the property line on each side.

The two say this project was ideal because they were involved from the start. That enabled them to integrate the acoustics into the design and hide elements behind the walls.

Rider realized he could maximize the seating by turning the pews diagonal and adding a balcony on only the right side.

RIDER: You can actually see the congregation in the balcony, they’re not behind you. And it makes for a much more intimate experience.

But that presented another challenge because it made the sound asymmetrical. Morgan made adjustments so people would hear the same thing in their right ear as their left ear.

Churches that cannot afford to buy a building, often rent.

Morgan also worked with Exilic, a church that leases space within an office building. Sound travels slowly, so by the time the sound from the stage reached the back of the room, it was muddy. 

Morgan worked his audio magic to add speakers and delay sound coming from some of them by milliseconds for the perfect fix.

MORGAN: The sound from here and there moved together. They create what you call a cohesive wavefront.

Morgan says, historically, church design has always been intentional. Whether it’s the altar table for communion, the baptistry, the pulpit, or the cross. 

Likewise, a thoughtful soundscape brings a space to life. And Rider adds that in a church, that’s especially significant.

RIDER: And really that you could be here in stillness and serenity. It’s about how can the space support a deeper connection with the Being that we’re all worshipping?

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Jenny Rough in New York City.

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