"Decorations and Acoustics" Video Transcription

Video Transcript: Decorations and Acoustics

All right, we're still looking at worship space and how that affects worship. We're looking at in this session on decorations and acoustics, physical space where you worship can be decorated to enhance the worship experience common. The common church vision, again, is to walk with God to talk with God's people to share our God walk with those who don't have a walk with God. So how does that affect? How do we express our vision in terms of decorations, banners, a common way that churches will have banners, either with a theme or with images on the banners paintings, you can actually put some paintings on the wall that have pictures or sometimes words, a lot of floral churches will put little trees and plants and shrubs and, and in, in season flowers, and it just gives you that feeling like you're, you know, in the garden again, PowerPoint actually can do almost anything, I mean, PowerPoint, you can just use it as a color as a backdrop and it can have images, he can have words, you can have videos going and all these things can create an atmosphere. sculptures, sometimes churches will have a series and they'll just as sculpture could be, you know, like two pieces of wood nailed together and then some rubble and, you know, the and the rubble might be symbolic of how we come with our broken lives. 

At the foot of the cross, it can be almost anything it can be made out of paper or anything. pottery, sometimes pottery, symbolic of the abundance that God gives us or the water. You know, my soul, there's this after the Oh, God, you know, like, like, like a deer pants for the streams of water. And the water can be symbolic of our relationship to God. The carpet, the color of the carpet, the wallpaper communicates something. words on the wall, some churches will have scriptures that they're memorizing, and they'll they'll actually put the words right on the wall. draperies, sometimes churches will put drapes and hanging silken that'll catch the light, and it will just create a little atmosphere. When I planted a church in Vancouver, we were meeting in a gym and the gym just like like a gym. And so we hung 12 foot banners across the front that were different colors. And then we use different size banners all around that, that gave the gym a feel and a focus right to the front and just sort of funneled your eyes right to the front. And all of a sudden, with with a few banners hung around the gym, it turned the gym into something different it became a sanctuary just with those banners are number 11. All kinds of creative things. Right now at our church. We're in a series on the book of Ephesians.

And I entitled The whole series with a question, Who are you? and then each little section of Ephesians says something about who you are. And then some creative person when you walk into our church what they did is they took all those words you are this you are a child of God, you are gifted you are rich you are and all these things from the book of Ephesians, she made like a big crossword puzzle, with all those words sort of crossing with one another. And so when you walk in, you see this on the wall, this big crossword puzzle with all these words that are from the book of Ephesians. So it's like helping people and then inside every week, she puts a new banner hanging down with that word for the day. Just creative ways that you can decorate and do something with your space that enables you to worship more fully. We mentioned this before, the difference between art versus craft craft is generally just decorations, we think it looks good. You know, we've got banners and they're colorful and they just give you a sense of joy. But you know, there's nothing symbolic necessarily about them. Art usually has meaning often multiple meanings and sometimes hidden meanings so that people have to work at what is that thing what and if you can move towards art. I think it's always a little bit better that at least when I'm doing something in church I'm always thinking okay, what can we do that communicate something What can we do that is that is that is meaningful. The acoustics of the space.

Nothing affects sound more than the space where the worship takes place can be dead space can be live space, and the room can dictate what kind of space or sound you're going to get library versus the bathroom library. sucks up the space or the sound. And the bathroom expands it so much that maybe you can't even understand what's being said. So your space in your sanctuary is going to affect the sound quality, the sound of the preaching the sound of the singing. Maybe it sounds good from the stage, but it doesn't sound good as a singer. Things that affect sound, what are these things, carpet, versus hard floors, I once had a pin that I could wear and I got it at some convention and the pin said, carpet bedrooms, not churches, you carpet a church and it just sucks all the sound, hard floors will make it more resonant. And when people sing, they'll hear themselves better people versus an empty building with you know, you have a soundcheck in an empty building with the worship singers. And it sounds really good. And then all of a sudden the people come in and the sound evaporates. Usually the volume has to go up because the people suck up the sound. 

Flat walls versus stuff on the wall. If you have a flat wall and the sound of the speaker hits that flat wall it slaps back and you can hear that that Echo, if you have stuff on the wall, the sound gets a little diffused. High versus low ceiling. The higher the ceiling, the more the sound has a chance to breathe, the lower the ceiling, it's harder to control Harder, harder to control, sound ceiling tiles, with that's what we had, we had all these ceiling tiles in the building in our ceiling. And it just ate the sound. So when someone would sing, you know you're in the congregation and you're trying to sing along. all you hear is yourself. You can't really hear the people around you and all you hear is yourself. And it sounds really dead no reverb. And so it doesn't sound very good. So you stop singing and the person next to you saw and no one sings because the sound doesn't reverberate and become bigger than just you. The speakers, he put speakers in the ceiling or is put them on the floor of their higher and the ceiling the sound can be more evenly distributed over the people. That's it, we're going to be putting our speakers in the ceiling and we're doing a arrays speakers. 

Array speaker sends a narrow beam. So we'll have one pointing to the back and then one pointing closer to the front. Analyze your sound space if possible. If you don't know what kind of sound your space is producing, you can analyze it, you can buy a 32 band equalizer and push each band up and see which ones give the most unwanted feedback. And then back those specific bands down. So you have this 32 band equalizer, you take the low and you push it up until it starts distorting and giving you feedback. And then you back it down and then you take the next one up and you do the same thing, you'll find that three or four or five of these bands need to be lower and some of them need to be a little higher to get the right sound in your room. Or you can download some room analyzing software, an especial neutral mic to do some of this testing and it will it will automatically adjust some of those things. Five common problems and what to do about your space and acoustics. The low ceiling and dead space try to make the ceiling or take this ceiling taking the ceiling tiles out to liven things up a bit. That's what we're doing in our church. Add more revert to the mix get rid of the carpet if possible. Get hardback chairs instead of cushions on the chair. hardback chairs will reverberate the sound better. high ceilings to a live space.

So you have low ceilings create dead space, but high ceilings might create to alive space. And what do you do, you can build these two foot by four foot actually it doesn't matter what size they are. But you build these little frames covered with cloth and backed with acoustical deadening material, there's special material, and it has to be three, four or five inches thick. And you build these little frames you can make them different colors, we're actually going to put little simple little paintings with special ink that that will still absorb sound. And we're going to put them on the back and the sides on our walls so that we don't get that slap, slap back. You know your speaker sends up the sound and it goes into hits a flat wall and it bounces back and you can hear it and it's delayed. So it's like you say something and hits the wall and backs back comes back at you. 

But now I'll go back and it will hit those those cloth. Little panels you have on the wall you'll see them in public building sometimes. And that just will take away that that that slap back step three slapback off the back wall music doesn't sound clear the pastor's voice is a bit of an echo, again, build these two foot four foot frames covered with cloth with acoustical tile, number four, a lot of feedback problems you're playing, and then it distorts in the in the sound, you know, it gets that real high buzz, going, get a 32 band EQ and try to eliminate the problem frequencies. A lot of churches of buildings and spaces will have like three or four frequencies that if you hit and hit that note, you know, the person plays that particular note and, and the whole building shakes. And if you just with that EQ, just take those frequencies down, it won't really affect much of the sound because there's 32 bands. And a lot of times you can eliminate those problem frequencies. 

Or be make sure the worship team is behind the main speakers, if you're getting feedback, and it's distorting, and it's, you know, it gets that high ringing pitch, it could be that the singers are getting ahead of the main speakers that are over here. And churches, kind of you know, it's a tough thing, because we're singing here. And then the people are singing right there. And we want to be as close to the people as we can get. And we need a speaker in between. So sometimes we want to slowly move that speaker back. So you know, we can cover more ground. But then it starts getting too far behind the singers. And then we get all this feedback. So those are those are five, five common problems.

People don't like to sing because they can hear their own voice. I mentioned that before. I'm singing. And all I hear is myself. And people aren't that impressed with themselves. If you've ever recorded yourself and listen to it's like, you know, dry sound like that. And probably not, you probably sound better than that. It's just the recording isn't very good. But people when they just hear themselves tend to shut down when they're singing. So there is something you can do, it's not easy to do, you know, big churches will do this very expensive to have someone come in and do it. But you can do it on your own, what you really need, what would help is you need a hard surface on the ceiling so that when they sing, the sound bounces off the ceiling and comes down. So five people right here singing, it goes up to the ceiling and bounce down to them. And so they hear all the people around them. But a lot of times if it's just a flat ceiling, it doesn't bounce down as well. 

So what churches can do is they'll build these these like panels, and they'll slightly turn them. So if that's the front of the stage, they're slanted this way on the ceiling, and then they'll put acoustical tile, or acoustic deadening material on the on the top side so that the speaker sound doesn't get in the ceiling and go all over the place that sort of kills that sound coming out of the ceiling. But when people sing that angle of that heart, you put a hard piece on this side, it hits that and bounces right back at at the people and because it's that angle, it does a better job of hitting now that's you know, it's a lot of work we're looking at how we could do that is we're you know, we're not going to spend a lot of money and all these things, we have all volunteer labor, we do it all ourselves. And you know even the acoustical panels, you can go online and figure out how to make that yourself if you had to buy them they cost a lot of money and certainly these ceiling things can cost a fortune. But we're looking at well how can we how can we make a few on our own and see how it goes. So that's I mean that's kind of an extreme thing. Just for us just taking the the ceiling tiles out of the ceiling. And now we have a harder surface tell you it made all the difference because right now we're in another space in our in our building, a space that has the acoustical tile and up is this the sound is just dead as can be. So decorations can make a difference in our worship another. The environment that we're in can make a huge difference and, and the decorations what it looks like but also what it sounds like.