Farnes Church, Norway

The Church of Farnes is finally complete after 36 years.
Pastor Olav Nese

As part of the renovation of Farnes Church, the previously used electronic room acoustic system, VRAS system, has been replaced with a modern VICELLO system from Müller-BBM Acoustic Solutions GmbH to achieve an extension of the reverberation time to up to 6 seconds.

The system was installed and calibrated by our Scandinavian distributor Jo Wang (Panpot AS).

Farnes Church was completed on 1970-04-12. Like many of the smaller Norwegian churches it has a rather short reverberation time due to its construction and material composition, i.e. predominantly wood and “porous” bricks,. These favour speech intelligibility for sermons and lectures but do not provide the desired acoustic properties for organ music and choir music which are highly valued throughout the Scandinavian region.

Hence, organist Bert Brons began searching for ways to improve the church’s acoustics as early as 1995. At the beginning of the millennium, the municipality finally approved the funds for a structural renovation. The plans were to extend the reverberation time from 1.5 seconds to approximately 2.0 seconds by conventional acoustic measures. While this would have significantly improved the acoustics for musical performances, it would inevitably have led to further deterioration of speech intelligibility. Since the latter was unacceptable, the decision was made in 2006 to install an electronic room acoustic system. With this system, the reverberation time could be extended if necessary without permanently adversely affecting the  natural speech intelligibility of the church – as would have been the case with structural measures.

The invisible has become alive.
Organist and Cantor Bert Brons:

After nearly 20 years of use, the VRAS system has been replaced with a modern VICELLO system. Today, VICELLO offers the possibility to extend the church’s reverberation time to up to 6 seconds.

In cooperation with panpot.no.