The Sound of a Church

The sound engineers who arrived to install the microphones and speakers complained bitterly. The acoustics, they said, were terrible. The renovation of the parish church was drawing to a close. In the late 1980s, the entire church - sanctuary and nave had been carpeted. Now carpet had been kept only under the seats and the rest of the floor area was tiled. This restored a more lively acoustic to the space. The priest was delighted because it once again sounded like a church and evoked the sense of a sacred place. The musicians were happy because the pipe organ and cantors sounded much richer and more resonant. For the people, it was a little like singing in the shower - they thought they were doing really well with their singing and responses.

What the sound engineers wanted was a dead space so that they could carefully calibrate the sound system to do all the work. This clarity of sound is what they always aimed for in auditoriums and studios. In a television studio, casual conversation and asides are all picked up and broadcast crisply. In the church, they pushed for the priest to wear a headpiece with a radio microphone by his cheek When the priest refused and said it was unsuitable for the liturgy, the sound engineers insisted that it was the only way to achieve good sound and, in any case, they had been installing them in churches all around the country.

What is happening here? Why the sharp difference of approach?

Let us start with the liturgy since a church building is designed primarily for the liturgical celebration. In the liturgy, God's saving action is incarnate in our human actions. We approach the mystery of grace in our speaking and reading, breaking bread and eating, drinking from the cup, plunging into water, anointing with oil, offering a sign of peace, bowing and making gestures with hands and arms. The liturgical action takes place in a live, physical, human event; people are present to one another. Voice belongs to a real person.

Before the 1950s, it would have been rare to have microphones and public address systems in churches. The technology was not yet good enough and, in any case, the Mass was celebrated in Latin, vocalised in a quiet voice by the priest at the altar, heard and answered only by the servers kneeling on the step. The people at best silently read a translation from their hand missals.

What then about preaching in the vernacular? Pulpits were placed in the nave, furnished with a sounding board above the priest's head, and the preacher learned to project his voice. Projecting the voice is not just speaking louder.  It is a way of producing sound from the diaphragm not the mouth; it allows the sound to resonate from all parts of the head and upper body.

This is what opera singers do when they sing on stage (even quietly) against a full orchestra, and can be heard in a vast auditorium without any amplification. Actors of yore whispered on stage and were heard in the gods.

Pop singers do not do this. Their voice production is shallow and they have a huge microphone right in front of their mouth. We live in an electronic age where most of the music we hear is recorded and so much of the human voice is mediated by technology. Even in the church, we have words and images on a screen, and speaking, singing and music all come out of a loud speaker system. Music might be played from a recording. At other times people 'attend' Mass through their television set. But making a TV program in a studio setting is not liturgy, nor is replaying it at a later elate.

When we come to church, most readers and many priests are so conditioned by these cultural habits that they adopt them in liturgy. They talk to the microphone and expect the technology to do the rest. The priest will use a lapel microphone (or head set), devices intended only for an interview in a television studio. Consequently the style is conversational, the accompanying gestures small. However, in a liturgical assembly of a hundred or several hundred, we are dealing with a public act. Leaders who project their voice adequately in the liturgical assembly will address the people not the microphone; they will throw their voice out towards the back rows; they wait for the echo to return and do not talk over it so that the message does not become garbled. This leads to a more measured proclamation, suitable pauses, and correspondingly more expansive gestures. Proclamation is a bodily and relational act within and with the liturgical assembly. In this scenario, the microphone gives the natural voice a lift; it supports but does not take over.

The problem is that this style of speaking is old fashioned. People no longer know how to project their voice.  Sports teachers shout and get hoarse because they do not know how to project. This is a key area for training priests and readers. Most of our problems with microphones in the church would disappear if we learned how to speak.

This article was originally published in Liturgy News Vol 48(1) March 2018. Reprinted with permission.

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