He says enhancement, I say project better - let's ban electronics in the
opera house
The following is from an industry expert, a good man, a good friend... and
I strongly disagree with him. When amplification or enhancement or little
green men stand between the source of music and me, it's like listening to
a recording. Live music should be that, not "doctored." I unconditionally
subscribe to Cyril Harris' practice of "nothing electronic, no moving
parts."
Re.: the Berlin Staatsoper clarification that it uses "enhancement,"
not "amplification," and my comment -
>So here we are, with "enhancement," rather than "amplification,"
>as it there was a difference! Same damn thing in the reconfigured
>Orpheum theaters on the West Coast, Eugene's Hult Center, even in
>Berkeley Rep's new *small* Roda Theater, etc. - woe, woe, u.s.w.
[From Garry Margolis]
Electronically enhanced acoustics (cf. ACS, whom I once represented,
and LARES) are not the same thing as what you call amplification.
In the latter, the sound directly emanating from the performer is
boosted and re-radiated through loudspeakers aimed directly at the
audience. Other names for this are sound reinforcement and PA aka
public address.
Assisted acoustics are different in principle and in practice.
An acoustical environment consists of many discrete reflections
of the original sound off the surfaces in the physical performance
environment. Because these are reflections and the path from the
source through the reflective surface to the listeners is longer,
they must, by necessity, reach the listeners' ears after the original
sound does.
If the reflections reach the listener's ears later than the first 50
milliseconds or so after the original sound does, the ear perceives
the reflections separately from the original sound. If the reflections
are too strong and discrete, they are perceived as echoes.
However, if there are many hundreds of discrete reflections and they
arrive very close to each other, they cannot be individually discerned
and are perceived as reverberation. The length of reverberation decay
and the tonal balance of this decay are primary characteristics of
what makes a good hall vs. a bad hall.
Electronically assisted acoustics supply additional reverberant
energy to a performance space. They are the equivalent of putting
more hard surfaces in the room and distributing them appropriately.
This is not the same thing as sound reinforcement, because the direct
sound from the performer is not changed, overpowered, or otherwise
different, with or without the enhancement system. But see the singer's
comments below.
I participated in several demonstrations of the ACS system in an
auditorium in the Netherlands whose natural acoustics are much too
dry. The musicians who were performing were uniformly enthusiastic
about the ACS system. In one case, a skeptical soprano who had never
worked with it was singing, with piano accompaniment, when the system
was switched off in mid-note, and she was shocked to find that the
warm, natural acoustic which was supporting her voice suddenly
disappeared -- she didn't realize that it was electronically created,
and when she was confronted with the hall's natural acoustic, she
had great difficulty in singing.
The biggest problem of that particular installation is the disconnect
between the aural and visual perceptions of the place. It's possible
to set the ACS system so it sounds like a much bigger hall than it
physically is, and I recommended that the system settings be chosen
so that the larger hall was simulated only when the house lights were
down.
I've been in the Staatsoper for a couple of performances and, frankly,
I don't know whether or not the LARES system was in use, but if it
was, I couldn't hear anything that I could identify as coming from
it, and there were certainly no artifacts.
I do know that the ACS system in the New York State Theater has been
panned in print by New York critics for performances during which it
was not turned on.
Go figure...
Garry
Janos Gereben/SF
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