Room as communication channel: David Lubman’s role in casting the relationship between program and room acoustics as an information-theoretical problem

Speakers, liturgists, performers, and acousticians have long recognized the interplay between room acoustics, program, and performance. Specific programs and styles of performance are better suited to specific spaces, suggesting that liturgical and musical forms developed to suit performance and worship spaces. In their 2001 paper “The History of Western Civilization Told Through the Acoustics of its Worship Spaces,” Lubman and Kiser went a step further to propose a causal mechanism; specifically, that changes in liturgical styles that evolved with changes in church architecture reflected the need to provide optimum encoding in an information-theoretic sense. While information theory had been used in prior work as a tool to predict channel capacity in rooms (e.g., methods for speech intelligibility developed by Peutz) and tied to elements of delivery (e.g., speech rate), the development of liturgical and musical forms had not been cast as a communication problem of maximizing information transfer. In demonstrating the empirical plausibility of this conjecture, Lubman laid the groundwork for future theoretical and empirical development in room acoustics. Here, prior development inspired by Lubman’s work is chronicled and opportunities for future work that can leverage recent developments in information theory and audition to explain subjective findings are highlighted.