Our Director of Music puts a lot of effort into stitching our videos of ourselves into a coherent synchronised whole, and in general the result sounds as it might in the warm but not resonant acoustic of our church. However some pieces demand a spot of reverb, and so he uses one of the various settings on his software. The Lady Chapel of St Alban’s Cathedral seems to yield the most satisfactory results: some echo where needed in Bairstow’s Let all mortal flesh, but not so much as to seem wildly out of keeping with our building. (The pictures of individual singers are superimposed on a shot of its interior.)
However there are other settings, and the Taj Mahal of reverberation is one called ‘Hamilton Mausoleum’. I’d never heard of this building so I looked it up. 15-second echo! It used to hold the record for the longest echo in a man-made structure but lost it to the Inchindown oil tanks where the sound of a pistol blank being fired was audible for 112 seconds. So in theory a short piece that ended very loudly could have an echo that lasted longer than it took to perform!
Now why is it these very echoey places are both in Scotland? Coincidence? Or is it just that the Scots have done more research into this particular record?