This post will further explore why good sound is important in a church service.
First of all, I would like to thank my friend, Graydon Pease, at The Choice Voice for doing the reading on my example. Check out his website – he provides a variety of services from voiceover work to MC and video promotions.
In one of my earlier posts I mentioned that even if the video or theatrical lighting system fails, as long as the sound system is running, the message can still be presented.
This time I am going to explore further why the sound system is the most important technology in a church for communicating your message. I know a lot of techs who say God created colour and our eyes, etc. I agree and believe that visuals and lighting Enhance the message as long as one can also Hear the message. Without good sound as your foundation all the visuals and lighting in the world won’t help you. It is similar as to how a band needs a good tempo from either a bass guitar, drum kit or click-track in order to be able to stay in time.
First let’s consider the angle of coverage our eyes and ears have.
For people with exceptional peripheral vision they can see close to 180° or more. Typical visual perception would be closer to just under 180°. Now how much coverage do our ears have for hearing sound? Our ears can hear 360°. (I am just looking at people with no visual or hearing impairments.) So looking at those two numbers one could argue that perhaps sound is very important to us and how we were created.
Exploring further, let’s look at the variation in the upper and lower limits of our senses. Our ears, (barring any hearing loss or impairment), can hear about 10 octaves from 20hz to 20,000 hz (20khz). That is a huge range! Now let’s compare that to our visual range. At the lower end of the visual range, the colour red comes in at approximately 400Thz. At the high end of the visual range, the colour violet is approximately 770Thz. This equates to approximately 1 octave on the same scale. Again one could argue that we were created for auditory communication as our primary form of communication.
Continuing on with our exploration let’s look at the differences in how we perceive sound and visuals.
Starting with visuals. We perceive light in averages. What that means is from a single source like a pixel on a tv screen or from a projector we see the average of the frequencies of light. Example, blue light and green combine to make yellow. Going away from technology. look at the sun. We perceive one colour from the sun, yet when you shine the sunlight through a prism, we see a rainbow of colour. But to the unaided eye we see the average of all the different colours, resulting in the one colour we see. Our ears on the other hand don’t need an aid to hear each different frequency or sound. With sound coming from a single source such as a speaker, we perceive the full spectrum of frequencies of sound. Furthermore, when a band or orchestra is playing you can identify each note of a chord and each instrument.
To demonstrate this, I am going to record my friend, Graydon, reading in a noisy area with an omnidirectional mic that picks up everything around the mic. Even though we can filter out and isolate what we are hearing, we still need to ensure we are presenting clear and intelligible sound during our services.
Wide Q 