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<\/i>, 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.)<\/p>\n
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! <\/p>\n
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? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 … Continue reading