Acoustics In Religious Institutions
Mr. Cheah Beng Kin
Friday, April 19 2002

Reported by: Assoc Prof Gan Woon Seng
Photos by: Robert Soo & Christopher Yap

The Singapore Section gathered on 19 April at the A.C.E. Daikin auditorium, Singapore to listen to the talk by Mr. Cheah Beng Kin, Director/Partner of CCW Associates Pte. Ltd. The talk is on the topic of Acoustics in Religious Institution. Mr. Cheah has been widely consulted on various acoustical issues on Churches, Mosques, Sikh temples, convention centers, educational institutions, and auditoria, and he based his talk on some of these valuable experience gained during his consultancy service.

Mr. Cheah began his talk by describing the audio-acoustics system chain, and stating that acoustics need not be the weakest link. The management of acoustics consist of many challenging tasks, and acoustic designers must understand the acoustic requirements for different applications, identifying the problems, and managing the acoustics as early as possible. Mr. Cheah then proceeded to describe several important issues on functional requirements, common local problems, range of audio sounds, design criteria, good acoustics geometry, internal reverberation, and noise control.

Mr. Cheah then explained on how noise can be suppressed from adjacent spaces, giving a theoretical formula on the amount of noise reduction of walls. According to Cheah, noise can be flanked through common air duct, ceiling plenum, flooring, and air duct, and care must be taken to prevent these noise flankings. He also suggested several ways on how to suppress noise by using cavity or multiple construction in between walls.

The final topic in his speech is on the distribution and positioning of the loudspeaker cluster in a large auditorium. Some of the distributions include frontal central cluster with or without supplementary speakers, distributed sidewall system, and distributed system with electronic delay and matrixing. He concluded his talk by explaining the latest electronic reverberation enhancement systems, which contains expensive setup of self-contained microphones, processing units, amplifiers, and loudspeaker system. Systems such as these are capable of providing variable internal reverberation for dry spaces, simulating very large spaces in small rooms.

During the Q&A session, many interesting questions were raised, such as the acoustical geometry, humidity, reverberation, and slap back control, and many useful insights were given by Mr. Cheah. This was truly a very interactive session with many participants staying back after the seminar to talk to the speaker, and various members of the AES sections.

The section would like to thank Mr. Harry Chua from A.C.E. Daikin, for his hospitality in hosting this event.