Coordinadora MH

If you give speeches or sermons on a regular basis, chances are that you spend a great deal of time and effort preparing the words you’ll deliver to your audience. You may labor over one particular phrase to make sure that it delivers the emotional impact that you want to achieve, but have you considered the effect that the room acoustics of the room in which you’ll be delivering that speech can have on not only the emotional impact, but on the very intelligibility of your words? Many large halls and meeting rooms are notorious for their poor acoustic qualities.

Depending upon where the listener is seated within the hall, they may have difficulty hearing and understanding your words. Usually, this is not a problem with volume, and turning up the volume can often just make matters worse. The sound that reaches the listener’s ear is an amalgamation of direct sound waves from the original source or from nearby loudspeakers and echoes or reverberations that emanate from the walls, ceiling, windows, and other solid surfaces from around the room.

In poor locations, the end result is a series of overlapping echoes that can make it very difficult to separate one stream of audio. Even if the listener is able to understand what is being said, the interference can be fatiguing and unpleasant. Most public speakers aim to leave their crowds energized rather than run down and tired.

Overlapping echoes can also distort the balance of sound frequencies reaching the listener. Some listeners may get an overwhelming abundance of bass notes while others hear little or no bass depending upon the timing between the arrival of the original sound waves and the echoed waves. If your presentation or sermon involves a musical component, this can be a serious problem.

Church acoustics and the acoustic properties of other public speaking or music halls can be corrected with a relatively minor effort. Using rigid fiberglass matrix panels such as Owens Corning 705 to reduce the echoes in problems areas can make a huge difference in the intelligibility and clarity of the sound your listeners hear. Instead of straining to understand your words, they can concentrate on the meaning of what you are saying. Isn’t that the point of giving a speech or a sermon?

One way to check the acoustics of your room is to have someone give a speech while you move from seat to seat and check all the different areas of the room and note the differences. Often the seats nearest wall and particularly near corners will have the worst acoustics. This will give you some idea of what people are hearing during your speeches, but the act of filling up the room with people can change the acoustics as well. Not only do they add irregular surfaces that break up sound waves, but they also add new sources of background noise that gets added into the mix.

By having someone you trust try out various seats during your speech or sermon to live crowds, you can get a pretty good idea of where the problem areas are, and whether you need to spend a little time adding some acoustic treatment panels so that the words you work so hard to weave together can be heard the way you want them to be heard.