Worship Space Acoustics

About the author(s)

Mendel Kleiner obtained his Ph.D. in architectural acoustics in 1978 and is currently Professor of Acoustics at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden, and in charge of the Chalmers Room Acoustics Group. Dr. Kleiner is responsible for teaching room acoustics, audio, electroacoustics, and ultrasonics in the Chalmers Master Program on Sound and Vibration. He has more than 50 publications, presented keynote lectures and more than 110 papers, has led courses at international conferences on acoustics and noise control, and organized an international conference on acoustics. His main research areas are computer simulation of room acoustics, electroacoustic reverberation enhancement systems, room acoustics of auditoria, sound and vibration measurement technology, product sound quality, and psychoacoustics. Dr. Kleiner is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, the Chair for the Audio Engineering Society’s Technical Committee on Acoustics and Sound Reinforcement and on its Standards committee on Acoustics.

David Lloyd Klepper is currently a student of Rabbinics at Yeshivat Beit Orot, Jerusalem, Israel. He was formerly President of Klepper Marshall King Acoustical Consultants, an Adjunct Professor of Architectural Acoustics at City University, New York City, and a senior consultant at Bolt Beranek and Newman. Mr. Klepper also has SM and SB degrees in Electrical Engineering from MIT. He has been an acoustical consultant for over 200 worship space buildings, including the National Presbyterian Church, Washington, DC; St. Thomas Church, New York City; the Capetown , South Africa, Anglican Cathedral; River Road Baptist Church, Richmond, Virginia; Young Israel of Southfield, Michigan; and Holy Cross Cathedral in Boston. He is a pioneer in the application of digital delay and electronic simulation of reverberation in worship spaces and in pew-back speech reinforcement. Mr. Klepper is the author of 37 published papers on acoustics, noise control, and electronic sound reinforcement systems. He was the Editor of Sound Reinforcement Anthology I and Sound Reinforcement Anthology II from the Audio Engineering Society (AES) and is a Fellow of both the AES and the Acoustical Society of America, a member of the Institute of Noise Control Engineering and the American Guild of Organists, and has received the Silver Medal (Berliner Medal) from the AES.

Rendell R. Torres is a priest for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany, New York. Before the priesthood, he was a tenure-track professor and director of the Program in Architectural Acoustics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and now continues to serve as an adjunct professor. He obtained his undergraduate degree in civil engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, his M.S. in engineering acoustics from Penn State University, and his Ph.D. in applied acoustics from Chalmers Tekniska Högskola (Chalmers University of Technology) in Gothenburg, Sweden. He pursued research in architectural acoustics and auralization with the Chalmers Room Acoustics Group in Sweden; at the Institute of Technical Acoustics in Aachen, Germany; and with the Acoustics Program at RPI. He has given lectures on his research for the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), the International Congress on Acoustics (ICA) in Japan and Italy, and the Institute of Acoustics (IoA) in the United Kingdom. He has been published in the Journal of the ASA and in Acustica, the journal of the European Acoustics Association. He is also an active cellist.