What is this site?
This project is to raise conscienceness about the detrimental effects of acoustical dampening in liturgical spaces. It is a work in progress, so feel free to ad your ideas, via email.
This page provides some arguments that can be launched for carpet's removal and avoidance in liturgical spaces (and in fact, anywhere that the aural arts are performed).
What can I do?
Act in your area or congregation for the removal of these items! and the use of acoustic instuments and unaided vocal production.
The Background
Carpet was widely introduced into (predominantly) Western Rite churches as part of an effort to foster homeliness, and to regulate temperature better.
In an era where church attendance was (is still) plumetting, any possibility of bringing more people in was considered worth trying.
The increased focus of the Minister interacting with the Assembled Faithful was also aided by the amplification system, whereby a more pally approach could be cultivated, and carpets complimented this strategy, and were indeed essential to the sound system working
correctly, or is this vice versa?.
The Arguments
Why Carpetting should be avoided
- Installation is very expensive, and usually occurs at the cost of other church programmes.
- Sound amplification is usually required following modification of the acoustic. This involves substantial, and usually ongoing expense.
- With sound levels substantially lower in the building, the un-"miced" people, singers, congregation are compromised.
- People make less contribution when their output is counter-acted.
- Organs and other acoustic instruments have their sound muffled and usually sustain rebuilding into a fundamentally different instrument to retify the (new) problems.
- Organs which have heritage value will have in effect sustained disfigurement. If a heritage painting was changed in colour it would be scandalous - if an acoustical space for a heritage instrument is altered, it too has been deformed, though not so unalterably.
- The heritage value of buildings may also be diminished by unsympathetic choice of material.
If carpet cannot be avoided
- Limit carpet to thin areas down central aisles.
- Choose carpet samples which are unobtrusive to the eye, and also of maximum reflective qualities.
- Do not place carpet in Sanctuary areas
- Do not place carpet in the immediate vicinity of performing musicians or organs.
- Choose reflective paints for wall and ceiling surfaces.
- Make soft, absorptive items a feature of the space and not the norm.
- Encourage the use of the natural voice - either sing more of the liturgy, or use projection of the (unamplified) voice.
- In the case of the organ, if carpets are unavoidable, it is arguably better to purchase a new instrument suitable for the new acoustic space.
Recent experience in St Mark's Fitzroy, a Melbourne parish where the beautiful interior has been restored and acoustic greatly enhanced has been that a few people singing encourages others to "have a go"*. This has an accumulative effect, and the sound grows exponentially. The reverse is witnessed whereever one experiences dead acoustics: no one is game to make a sound.
The fear of silence in worship is paradoxically linked to the wish to remove extraneous sounds like footsteps. Maybe we should learn to accept meditation time free from talk or music; and also accept space with its natural resonances unimpeded.
* a great australian theme!
Excellent Links
from the pages of //www.phoenixorgans.com
Built of Living Stones:
Art, Architecture, and Worship
Guidelines of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops
To contribute to this page
Contact Christopher Cook with your ideas.
Updated Febrary 21, 2003