Late last year, Kevin Young, freelance music and tech writer, professional musician, and composer ask to write up a profile article on JdB Sound Acoustics. After several interviews, he submitting the article to Church Sound Magazine which is part of Pro Sound Web. Pro Sound Web has published a number of my projects over the years and they are a great resource for churches for all things about church sound, lighting, and AV.
Is the performance of your worship space a priority? Is the message always crystal clear in every seating position, and over 60% of the congregation is singing all the time? If you say no to either or both questions, and you want your church to sound right for speech and music, the biggest obstacle is often the acoustics. The second is money. The third is aesthetics.
Fix the room! How? Follow what the Bible says, and you will not be disappointed. After all, it is God’s plan, not man’s idea. Do you think that the results will be less than perfect if you follow His plan completely? Isn’t the Bible the Living Bible? Since when did the Bible stop teaching us new things about science? Check out Solomon’s Temple, and the answers are there. They always have been. It’s just taken a while to join the dots.
But it costs too much! Oh, you mean the cost of a few floor monitors or a couple of wireless microphones considered too much? That is often the cost of the Bible’s way of fixing the acoustics or about $3.50USD per seat for a 300 seat church. (Not including the price for the knowledge of knowing what to do.) Replacing a mixer costs about $15.00-21.00 per seat. Replacing pews for chairs cost about $75.00 per seat. Buying 10 Shure SM58 mics with cables and mic stands – costs about $1,500.00. Fixing the acoustics of a church is cheaper than you think.
If the look of any acoustical treatment is a concern, ask yourself this. Are you there to worship God or the building? Fixing the acoustics is like saying you are more interested in hearing what God has to say through your minister. Putting up with acoustical problems, poor quality congregational singing, and accepting a sound system with limited performance is like saying the building is more important than the message and having fellowship with other believers.
It all comes down to priorities. The primary purpose of any building that is a dedicated House of God is the preaching of the Gospel. A place where the Gospel message can be spoken without distortion or interface. That includes making the room behave as God would want us to have it. The second priority is the breaking of bread and drinking of wine in remembrance of what Jesus did for all of us. The worship space has to support this event as often as each church chooses to remember. The next priority is congregational singing. There isn’t any other experience that can replace the joy and excitement of a room where more than 75% of the audience is singing. Songs that tell stories of Jesus, his atonement of our sins, and of people who follow Jesus are powerful in bringing people together. It takes the same quality of acoustics to hear clear speech as well as great congregational singing. These are the things that matter when you are a part of the Kingdom of God.
While I do have a business about church acoustics and sound, there is no possible way for one person or one company to fix all of the churches out there that need help. By making this public, it means that no one can patent it and force churches to pay a license fee. It means that no one can control it and inflate the cost of fixing existing and new churches. Churches should use the Bible’s methods with confidence, to apply in faith what God teaches, even without expert help. When churches take such a leap of faith, in most cases, the results are outstanding.
This information is being shared because I care more about winning people for Christ through better sound than creating a business empire. By revealing what the Bible teaches, by showing that science backs it up, that it is affordable for every church to have excellent acoustics, this is all part of the Great Commission. If more people with a passion and skills like mine, were to apply what the Bible teaches about sound, we could make a difference. Mat-7:15. Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. (KJV) If you have the chance, read the rest of what Jesus said in Mathews 7:15-20. Don’t trust me. Trust the Bible.
In the field of acoustics and sound, many have said that Wallace Clement Sabine is considered the father of modern-day architectural acoustics. His scientific work was not only the foundation for concert hall acoustics, but few are aware of how his work has impacted the church community around the world. According to several sources, he was raised in a protestant home, but as an adult belonged to no church and professed no religious faith, yet his work has impacted churches in ways even Wallace could not have imagined. Wallace’s work included figuring out a prediction model of how to apply absorption to tame a room. He also proved that the reverberation time alone is not enough in helping performance spaces with their sound needs. He laid down a foundation, showing that you need much more detailing and care to create suitable sounding spaces, not just for concert halls, but for full Christian worship too.
Shortly after his discoveries and successes, most acoustical experts, Architects, engineers, and audio experts have focused on one thing, the reverberation time of a room – ignoring much of his actual contributions to modern acoustics. When Wallace created the first equation to calculate how much absorption is needed, most people thought that this equation was something magical. It was almost as if a single number could solve all sound problems for concert halls and performance spaces. While such a numeric value is essential, it was a small part of a much larger picture. Sure, Wallace did devote a lot of his time to such studies. Unfortunately, the absorption calculation moved from being a small tool as part of a broader view of performance acoustics to becoming the only thing that mattered. This equation gained mythological-importance to the point that for many laypeople….
Once again we see science and the Bible in almost perfect harmony. Within science, there are many tools. For acoustics, there are specific tools. With the help of the Bible, it requires a set of tools that are unique to churches. For concert halls, recording studio’s and other entertainment venues, there are a set of tools for each one. Most of those tools do not apply to churches. When the tools of an acoustical consultant don’t use the Biblical tools exclusively, you will always get the acoustical performance of what those tools were based on. If you have only concert hall or studio or entertainment tools, then the results will not meet all of the needs of the church. If you use Biblical tools, you wind up with a House of Worship as the Christian community should have, but most churches don’t have a clue of what they are missing out.
Solomon’s Temple was very detailed in how it sounded. If you believe in the Trinity as I do, because of John 1:3 you know that Jesus design the temple that Solomon built. Without the acoustical planning in Solomon’s temple, the Levites would of had to have super natural powers to hear each other within the walls of the temple. There is no record of the Levites having such powers. What did they do to the temple to make it possible for people to hear in such are large space?
Here is something to consider. If Solomon’s temple is a myth, then the details of how the temple walls were completed should not have survived over history. After all, there is no record of the interior of Herod’s Temple other than some carving on the ceiling that Herod ordered which is not in the Bible. If someone says the Scriptures are not the inspired word of God, then the details of Solomon’s temple wouldn’t matter. But what happens when you apply the details of Solomon’s temple to an existing church? If it is a myth, nothing should happen. If it fixes a church, doesn’t that prove God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit? What does that mean if over 400 churches have applied such a system in faith, using the same methods from the Bible to make the acoustics of their churches as best as they can be?
The details of Solomon’s temple matters. Nothing in the Bible is about trivial nonsense. Everything in the Bible has a purposes and the details of Solomon’s Temple is a roadmap to fixing existing churches and it should be a template for new churches today now that we understand why such details were persevered for us in the scriptures today. How many more churches need to be convinced before it becomes a normal way to complete our houses of worship?
If anyone with normal hearing in a church has trouble understanding what is being said in God’s House of Worship, the Bible has the solution for that. And that solution is very affordable. Please enjoy the rest of the article.
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