Acoustical design issues for contemporary places of worship

This presentation intends to discuss the acoustical design of contemporary places of worship in the range of 500 to 3000 seats. The wide variety of programming requirements, concurrent uses, space constraints, and undesirable adjacencies in contemporary churches can be a similar challenge to many performing arts spaces. Many contemporary churches have loud, amplified music in their services and children’s classrooms. In addition, religious study courses in adjacent classrooms are being held at the same time as the main worship service. During off‐hours the spaces are used concurrently for teaching, conferences, weddings, prayer, and rehearsals. In many cases, the rooms outside of the main worship space are undersized and have undesirable adjacencies to each other as well as the main worship space. Using case studies we will discuss sound isolation design to reduce interference between concurrent unrelated uses, as well as room shaping and room finish treatments (including variable acoustics) to address ro...