Acoustics Over Aesthetics

Nobody has ever left a wedding talking about the ceiling.

They talk about whether they could hear the vows. They talk about the speech that landed, or the one that died on its feet because the best man was competing with a room made entirely of concrete, glass and polished floorboards. Every venue in this country photographs beautifully now. Hardly any of them sound like anything.

This is the trade nobody makes on purpose. You walk into a converted woolshed on a quiet Tuesday in March. It is empty. The light is doing something extraordinary through the gaps in the timber. You do not clap once to hear what comes back. You book it.

Then everyone arrives at once and the room becomes a swimming pool. Hard surfaces throw sound back, soft ones swallow it, and a barn with a tin roof and a slab floor has no soft anything. Which is why the band sounds like a scuffle in a car park and your grandmother spends the entire reception nodding at sentences she cannot hear.

A photograph cannot show you how long a clap hangs in the air, or the wall you are sharing with whoever booked next door. A room is an instrument. You are choosing one with your eyes.

The clock is part of the room

Venues that have thought about sound tend to say so, and what they publish is a time. It will not be on the page with the photographs. It sits in the terms, under function hours, where nobody thinks to look. Read the times.

One Broome hotel publishes two of them, and its reason.

In consideration for our house guests, we require that music is at a quieter level from 10.30pm onwards and all music will be switched off at 11.00pm.

Quieter at 10.30, off at 11, alcohol service ending at midnight, because this is a working hotel with rooms above the function spaces. The same brochure carries a second line worth just as much: "the hotel reserves the right to book other functions in adjoining rooms at any time". Exclusive use is not what you are buying, and whoever is next door is part of your acoustics.

A retreat in Bundaberg does the same job in one sentence.

Due to the residential location of Riverside Retreat, all music and entertainment must cease no later than 11pm, with all guests to have vacated by midnight.

A time and a reason together. The reason is the valuable half: it tells you whether the rule will bend, and who enforces it.

A beachfront bar on the Fraser Coast publishes the shape of the whole night: licensed to have guests on the premises until midnight, last drinks at 11pm, music permitted until 11pm. Then one line where the tone changes. "Please be mindful that we have strict noise restrictions that must be adhered too." It asks to be told in advance who your musician or DJ is, so it can brief them. Nobody briefs a DJ about the flowers.

The model to copy is a farm on the Limestone Coast, which lays the whole wind-down out in order: last drinks 11.45pm, midnight curfew, live music finishing by 11.30pm. Three times, published together, before you have booked anyone. A band reading that knows exactly what it is being hired to do.

At one High Country lodge the rule is one line. "Music and noise must wind down by 11pm." A separate line puts everyone not sleeping on the property on the road by 11.30pm, which leaves 18 people, twenty minutes from Mansfield. "For everyone's safety, guest transport is by bus." A curfew is not a suggestion when the way out has a departure time.

The building picks your band

Sound rules do not only say when the music stops. Sometimes they say who is allowed to make it.

At one Swan Valley venue, live bands and outdoor speakers are not permitted after 7pm. Not 11pm. Seven. Separately, unless you engage the venue's preferred DJ company, the doors to the external courtyard close at 10pm and the dancing moves inside, and the venue says that company's sound system was designed for the building. The building shaped the supplier list long before you saw the place.

Another Limestone Coast venue publishes a constraint that only bites if you have booked a band.

Band or DJ can have access to the venue for set-up and sound checks between 2pm and 5pm on the day or between 12pm and 6pm on the day prior subject to availability.

Two windows, both narrow, both subject to availability, and no access to the room on the wedding day itself unless otherwise arranged. If your band is coming from out of town, that is a question for the inspection, not for the week of the wedding.

The rooms that sell their sound

A few venues run the argument the other way. One of them marries people underground, in a cave system near Rockhampton, and calls its ceremony chamber "renowned for its remarkable natural acoustics", the venue's own wording, not a measurement. What the room asks of you in return is harder to wave away: music as MP3 or WMV on a USB drive at least two weeks ahead, so the coordinator can set it into the cave's surround sound system, with a running order recommended song by song. A venue that specifies your file format has thought about its room.

A Bendigo venue treats an acoustic feature as a feature. One of its rooms can be, in the venue's words, "divided into two separate spaces using a soundproof retractable wall", 80 seated or 150 cocktail whole, 32 seated or 50 cocktail halved. Soundproof is the venue's word rather than a measurement, but somebody put a moving wall into that building years before anyone booked a band, and they were thinking about noise when they did it.

One Brisbane venue built for events takes up to 1,500 people, and an assisted hearing loop sits among its amenities. That is a building treating hearing as equipment rather than luck.

What quiet costs

There is one clean way out of all of this. Buy the whole place, and put it where nobody can hear you. One woolshed outside Mudgee answers the question in its own FAQ without hedging.

Are there any noise restrictions or curfews? There are no noise restrictions or curfews. Feel free to make as much noise as you want, any time of day or night.

That is a statement that they do not exist, not a gap in the paperwork, and it holds because the shed sits on a 2,400-acre working farm. Rural does not mean unrestricted. It means this shed has that much distance around it.

A Great Ocean Road farm prices the same freedom: a two-night, whole-property weekend at $9,900, beds for up to 190 people, no curfew. That buys the property and not the wedding, with catering, drinks and suppliers on top, and the published figure carries no date. Quiet is not a quality the room happens to have. It is a line item.

What to do at the inspection

None of which matters unless it changes what you do in an empty room.

• Clap once, hard, in the middle of the empty floor and listen to the tail. If it rings on, the room needs bodies, drapes, rugs and an engineer who knows it.
• Send someone to the farthest corner and speak from where the celebrant will stand, at normal volume. If the words do not carry in an empty room, the vows will not carry in a full one.
• Stand where the speeches will happen and look up. Hard, high, parallel surfaces over a microphone are the enemy.
• Ask what is above you, beside you and behind that wall. Hotel rooms. Houses. Another function booked to strangers.
• Get the sound rules in writing: when music must stop, whether the limit changes outdoors, whether a limiter is fitted, and who makes the call to turn it down.
• Ask when a band can get in to sound check, and whether the preferred supplier list exists because of the building. Sometimes that second answer is yes.
• Treat the wet-weather space as a sound question. Plan B is usually smaller, lower and harder than the room you fell for.

The photographs were never at risk. What is at risk is the moment somebody stands up with a microphone to say something true about a person they love. The room either carries that or it eats it. You can find out which on a quiet Tuesday in March, in an empty building, by clapping once.