One more musical theater post before moving on. Can someone tell me when it became a good idea to mic these productions even in venues with excellent accoustics and in productions with talented performers? I can see miking the middle school play that happens in a cafetorium (it's a real word) but why are we miking people in the Philadelphia Academy of Music? It gives probably otherwise beautiful voices a tinny quality and sets up a painful competition between the performers and the orchestra to be heard.
I know that miking has opened the theater to less talented performers who don't belong on a stage but I have a feeling that the people benefiting from this policy aren't actors who can really use the work and I'm sure it hasn't helped the audiences out at all.
I wonder if they're simply recording everything. But if so, they shouldn't have to play it through the speakers. Odd that they'd mic a nice acoustical space like that.
Posted by: albert | March 30, 2006 at 09:35 AM
Besides the obvious point that miking everything gives the sound crew control over relative volumes and separation in space of the sounds on stage, miking individual performers allows their performances to be "improved" by pitch correction. They'll deny it hotly, but it's quite audible once you know what you're listening for.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4153600
Posted by: Neddie Jingo | March 30, 2006 at 10:04 AM
Besides the obvious point that miking everything gives the sound crew control over relative volumes and separation in space of the sounds on stage,
Who are you who are so wise in the ways of sound engineering? I guess my question is, is all that sound space management an improvement worth trading for maybe a slightly muddled but definitely a more natural sound experience? I felt like I was hearing the show through a hearing aid instead of live. And if you don't have a really first rate sound engineer, I think all that mixing does more harm than good to start with.
Let's just face facts. It's all a conspiracy to get Brooke Shields and Christina Applegate on Broadway.
Posted by: eRobin | March 30, 2006 at 10:14 AM
You need a conspiracy for that?
Posted by: Thomas Nephew | March 30, 2006 at 10:49 PM
I guess my question is, is all that sound space management an improvement worth trading for maybe a slightly muddled but definitely a more natural sound experience?
I'm not a sound engineer -- just an amateur musician who's interested in this stuff. I completely agree with you that the artificiality and tinniness of PA systems is terribly off-putting, but you might sympathize with the director faced with the trade-off. On one hand you have an audience who with every passing day is increasingly willing to put up with the artifice of a PA system; on the other, you have control over, say, sound effects. Sending your SFX through a mixing board, you can make (for example) an offstage car starting up and driving away actually move left-to-right across the stereo spectrum, helping the psychoacoustic realism.
(And boy howdy, if your ingenue just can't for the life of her hit that high B, you can save yourself some embarrassment by dialing it in yourself.)
Think about it this way. One of the things that was most adventurous about the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper was that it was one of the first commercial records that presented a completely artificial soundscape. No matter where you stood in the Pepper "theater," there was no way you could possibly have heard the performance that is presented on the record. Sit behind the conductor, you get one acoustical experience; sit at the back of the hall, you get another. "Pepper" blew this concept out of the water: There is no "front-row seat" to that album. All the seats are good ones -- and the performance is completely impossible to duplicate accurately in real life.
A PA goes quite some way toward "democratizing" the performance for the cheap seats. But, as you say, there is a concomitant deadening of the experience for everyone.
If you want to draw some elitist political conclusions from this, be my guest. I'll just keep attending small clubs and theaters, where this isn't an issue.
Posted by: Neddie Jingo | March 31, 2006 at 09:48 PM
I'll just keep attending small clubs and theaters, where this isn't an issue.
Good advice.
Posted by: eRobin | March 31, 2006 at 11:38 PM