[Dixielandjazz] Acoustics . . . Where were you sitting?

[Steve barbone]

Here's an interesting article about acoustics and how the listener's
location in the venue may well be the most important ingredient in how the
band or singer sounds.

Perhaps we get too wound up in what "we" hear, as opposed to whatg most of
the rest of the people hear? :-) VBG.

Who is right regarding sound. Perhaps everybody. Sound is relative.

Cheers,
Steve 


Even at Concert Halls, It's Location, Location, Location

By ANNE MIDGETTE - NY Times - January 3, 2006

Some time ago I went to a concert at Carnegie Hall that involved a lot of
talking from the stage. I was pleased with the way the performer engaged
audience members by talking to them between numbers, using a hand-held
microphone; and the audience seemed responsive and involved. A week or so
later, I spoke on the phone to a friend I had run into at the concert and
asked him what he and his wife had thought of it. I wondered if they had
found the approach distressingly populist. "Well," my friend said, "we liked
the music; but as for the talking, we couldn't understand a single word he
said."

We think of concerts as fixed entities. In our age of mechanical
reproduction, live performance has become - like a book, a movie, a painting
- an object that can be recorded, examined and stamped with approval (or
disapproval). So we tend to think that everyone who attends the same
performance is hearing the same thing.

But that's not true, and not only because of vagaries of taste or hearing.
It makes a big difference where you sit.

It's obvious, even elemental. The audience member sitting in orchestra seats
and engaged by the performer's facial expressions has a different experience
from someone at the back of the house who can't see them. Some voices sound
deceptively full from the orchestra and fade to nothing at a distance. Not
long ago I praised a singer as a "full soprano." "Where were you sitting?" a
colleague asked a few days later; from his seats in the balcony, he had had
trouble hearing her.

Other performances sound better far away, something we forget in a visually
oriented society that places a premium on being able to see what's going on.
At the Metropolitan Opera, whenever I can I make a point of "trading up" -
up, that is, to the family circle. The orchestra immediately sounds three
times richer, welling up under the voices; and edges of sound that seem
rough close-up may be smoothed out when heard from the distance they're
meant to be projecting to. That distance forces honesty: voices that sound
adequate from the orchestra become puny in the family circle; but voices
that seem raucous may also, at that remove, become impressive.

It's easy to forget this because of the enforced passivity of the concert
experience. You are compelled to sit in the same seat for a couple of hours,
and if you're a subscriber, for a whole season. You may not even realize
that your reaction could be different if your seat at Carnegie Hall, for
example, were not under the overhang of the balcony, or your seat at the Met
were on the other side of the house. (I'm convinced there's a section of
right-hand orchestra seats at the Met that have a funny echo and less "ping"
than the critics' seats on the left, but I can't prove it.) At Caramoor one
summer, I moved up a few rows at intermission to sit with a friend. I
suddenly felt I was hearing a different concert, and would have misjudged
the soloist had I not had this new perspective.

Concert presenters would like to play down these vagaries. For one thing, it
isn't practical for everyone to move around all the time. We are no longer
in 18th-century France or at an opera house in 19th-century Italy; audiences
then were far more ambulatory than is the norm today. For another, at
today's ticket prices presenters want to be able to offer every purchaser
the best possible experience, a democratic distribution of acoustical "sweet
spots." 

Enter the acousticians, who have plenty of work these days because of a
paradoxical climate in which, as classical music struggles with its future
and faces declining audiences, new concert halls are being built at a
remarkable rate around the country. Acousticians have come to approach a new
hall as an instrument in itself: lined with rare wood like a violin, fitted
with panels and curtains that can be manipulated and fine-tuned to create
the optimal sound environment for each concert. But acoustics remains an
art, and art, practically by definition, eludes the formulas of science. In
short, sometimes it works (the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles gets
raves), sometimes it doesn't (people are ambivalent about the Kimmel Center
in Philadelphia).

The point is not really that this is a problem requiring a solution. The
point is to acknowledge and take responsibility for the role you play in
what you hear: to think of the factors influencing your perception, whether
it's where you sit or where you studied, and question how those factors
affect what you hear. Seating location merely represents the kinds of limits
on individual perception that are also honed by background, taste,
prejudice, enthusiasm.

My husband, a composer, hears music very differently from his friend who is
an orchestra musician: my husband may focus on the part writing, while his
friend is attuned to the way the conductor handles particularly tricky bits
in the score. The woman in front of me at Alice Tully Hall recently who
fidgeted in acute boredom throughout a concert heard something different
from her husband beside her, rapt in the music and the moment. Attuned to
the fixed entity of a CD, we tend to forget the Rashomon quality of live
experience: the range of perspectives and the rewarding debate that can grow
out of them. 

As a critic, I receive one category of mail more than any other: the
indignant letter from someone asking whether I could have been at the same
performance as she was. So let it be openly acknowledged: whether I attended
the Thursday performance of a concert that she had heard on Saturday, or
because I was sitting in the orchestra while she was in the balcony, I
probably wasn't.