Churches are buildings with special acoustical characteristics in the sense that they are worship spaces. In such spaces,
worshippers need to feel Godly presence through preaching and chanting. At the
same time they need to be able to follow clearly the content of the priests’
message. This entails that a church ought to allow long Reverberation Time (RT
- the time it takes for sound to die out) for a sense of awe, and at the same an
RT short enough to allow for speech intelligibility. One has to design the acoustics of a church in
such a way to balance these two opposing requirements. In other words it is easy
for an Acoustician to “deaden” the acoustics of a church to secure high Speech
Intelligibility. In the absence of long reverberation time and thus eliminating
awe, one transforms a priest (a representative of God) into an ordinary man. It is therefore recommended that the reverberation
time in this worship space to be of the order of 1.8 seconds (in general
anywhere between 1.5 and 2.5 seconds) in the mid frequencies.