Crossroads Tabernacle Boden Center for the Performing Arts, Bronx, NY; image courtesy of WSDG.
Achieving a good acoustical environment that works to support worship does not happen by accident, but takes careful planning. To help church designers undertake this planning more confidently, Church.Design caught up with experts and asked them to weigh in.
“People expect acoustics to magically appear without any changes to the architecture. Fortunately, today there are a number of electro-acoustic solutions that can help.” John Storyk, Founding Partner, Walters-Storyk Design Group, New York, NY
When it comes to acoustical considerations, Vance Breshears, director at Idibri at the company's San Diego office, says designers must always begin with the program requirements for the space, asking questions such as, “What type of music or what other activities will take place in the room?” “How important is congregational participation?” And “Do you want the congregation to be able to hear themselves and each other during worship?”
Calling it like it is
“The acoustical characteristics of any room are determined by the room size, shape and finishes,” Breshears says. “All three of those items are either determined by or influenced by the architecture of the space. So acoustics and architecture go hand in hand.”
John Storyk, founding partner of Walters-Storyk Design Group in New York City, believes speech intelligibility is the most important acoustic consideration in a worship space design.
“The spoken word must be clear, precise and accurate,” he says. “This is often at odds with the music component of the church’s service profile. These two different content profiles have very dissimilar room acoustic requirements, specifically with respect to reverb time and initial time delay signatures.”
"These two different content profiles [spoken word and music component] have very dissimilar room acoustic requirements, specifically with respect to reverb time and initial time delay signatures.” John Storyk, Founding Partner, Walters-Storyk Design Group, New York, NY
Balanced acoustics for a wide variety of content is certainly one of the primary issues with designing a space. Storyk notes that in historical settings (i.e., churches where one cannot make any major architectural changes), this always presents a challenge.
“People expect acoustics to magically appear without any changes to the architecture,” he says. “Fortunately, today there are a number of electro-acoustic solutions that can help.”
Nick Colleran, vice president of Acoustics First in Richmond, Va., always starts a project by asking what type of service is going to be in the church—contemporary with a large music component or more traditional with just a pastor speaking from the pulpit. The answer can direct the acoustic plan.
“If you are designing a church from scratch, I always recommend it be deep rather than wide,” he says. “The shape of the worship space is very important acoustically.”
“If you are designing a church from scratch, I always recommend it be deep rather than wide. The shape of the worship space is very important acoustically.” Nick Colleran, Vice President, Acoustics First, Richmond, VA
Cameron Girard, principal designer for Acoustics First, adds that some of the most significant challenges to a decent acoustical environment can include excessive reverberation where the room is too “live” or too “dead,” late arriving reflections that sound like an echo, and high background noise levels from either external noise sources or mechanical systems. And solving these issues takes planning and knowledge of what to look for.
Acoustics First did a project for Ironbridge Church in Chester, Va., and because it had a mix of traditional and contemporary services, they wanted a design that worked for both. A combination of Sonora panels and Double Duty Diffusers were specified.
“To enhance spaciousness and trap bass, we suggested Double Duty Diffusers across the upper portions of the rear wall,” Colleran says. “These barrel-type diffusers scatter mid-high frequencies, which reduces distracting reflections without making the room too ‘dead' sounding. This way, during traditional services, the congregation feels surrounded by sound, but the sound is diffused, allowing for better speech and music comprehension for both types of services.”
Noise control
Another big challenge is noise bleed or sound “leakage,” which is primarily an isolation or structural acoustics issue. When it comes to sound isolation between adjacent noise-sensitive spaces, there are no shortcuts or miracle solutions. It takes good planning and engineering.
When it comes to sound isolation between adjacent noise-sensitive spaces, there are no shortcuts or miracle solutions. It takes good planning and engineering.
“The most important factor is that the partitions between spaces are completely sealed air tight,” Breshears says. “If there are any holes, then sound can travel through those holes. One simple way to check for penetrations is to turn off the lights in the room where you are and look for light coming through holes or gaps through the wall.”
Church services often demand very quiet moments, thus they need to avoid disturbance by another sound source (i.e., a noisy social hall, children’s nursery area or exterior noise, such as street traffic, sirens, etc.) Correspondingly, a church can occasionally cause disturbances to community neighbors.
“Acoustic isolation between spaces happens in much the same way that good studio isolation takes place—often using the same techniques (i.e., decoupled boundary design, robust penetration sealing techniques, adhering to tested and proven STC ratings for architectural objects such as doors and windows, and careful attention to ductwork and electrical conduit routing, etc.)” Storyk says.
As an example, he cites recent work at the Crossroads Tabernacle – Boden Center for The Performing Arts in the Bronx, N.Y., a job that presented an atypical sound isolation problem.
“Because Pastor Joseph Cortese is a talented musician with an entrepreneurial spirit, he believed a professional recording studio in the basement of his church would be a valuable asset to the community,” he says. “While we were initially concerned with providing the primary worship area with finely tuned acoustics and high-quality speech intelligibility, the recording studio needed to be fully isolated from the rest of the church and from the children’s educational area.”
Image courtesy of WSDG.
To ensure this isolation, WSDG engaged room-within-room construction including “floating” floors. Variable acoustic panels (solid wood on the outside over two-inch-thick, fabric-covered insulation) on the rear wall of the studio facilitate changes in the room’s reverberation time with minimal effort.
Image courtesy of WSDG.
“Since the facility lies in the middle of the Bronx, special consideration was given to isolation to eliminate noise from the outside, and to isolate the auditorium from the adjacent control room and live studio,” Storyk says. “Recording sessions can happen simultaneously with church services with no sound leakage into or out of either area.”
To provide wall or floor/ceiling assemblies that have good isolation, Breshears notes you generally need massive materials that are heavy and dense, combined with multiple layers with a single air space between layers if possible. Mass and air space are most critical for low frequency performance where isolation is difficult.
As with interior sound isolation, it takes the right construction methods and materials to achieve good sound isolation from the outside.
“Likewise, isolating sound from bleeding out into the neighborhood takes the same type of attention to detail and using the right construction materials and methods,” Breshears says. “Windows and doors are often the weak link to achieving good sound isolation for a building shell.”
Idibri recently did a noise study where the neighbors were complaining due to sound from the worship space leaking out of the building out into the neighborhood. It turned out that the homes were uphill from the church and noise was traveling through the roof.
“The walls were of the building were concrete and provided great isolation, but the roof was a lightweight roof deck assembly,” Breshears says. “Unfortunately, short of turning down the PA system during services, the only solution was to build a composite roof with multiple layers of specific isolating materials on top of the roof.”
Acoustics First
Idibri
Walters-Storyk Design Group (WSDG)
