Do you really want to hear Bill Evans or Glen Gould with each of your ears suspended two inches over the piano strings - one over the trebles and another over the bass strings? Is the bass and treble designed to be perceived as coming from different sides of your head? Must stereo disintegrate music? Is there something wrong with the sound of a piano from a few feet away, even as it blends with the sounds of other instruments? Have we lost the ability to make the adjustment in performance and in listening that will allow us to preserve some beauty of sound?

Sometime in the late 60's I was working in Broadway theater orchestras as a bass player and sometime conductor, when I took a job in a Neil Simon, Burt Bacharach show called "Promises, Promises". Phil Ramone had been hired to be the sound consultant/engineer and a decision was made to apply recording technology to a theater for the first time. The attempt was to "control" the sound by covering the orchestra pit and miking the orchestra. Four women were hired to sing in the pit where they could concentrate on producing beautiful sound without dancing and acting to distract them or drain their energy. Their voices were then amplified and directed through loudspeakers to support the sound of the stage chorus. The thought was that this new method was going to revolutionize musical theater sound and many productions since then have followed suit to one degree or another to the overwhelming detriment of the live theater experience.

Once the commitment to the use of this technology is made and the natural acoustics thwarted by the necessity of covering the pit, there seems to be no way to restore a semblance of balance to the elements that make up the complete acoustic picture. The sound of the orchestra is distorted and pinched. In the interest of making sure that the bass violin is heard in a balance that resembles what people are used to in popular music recordings it is over amplified and bloated, putting what should be the foundation of the music into a disproportionately dominating and distracting position.

Expensive and complex equalization was applied to the sound system in order to avoid the resonances that occur in any enclosed acoustic situation. None of this seemed to help. The musicians continued to control balances among themselves according to the limited perspective available to them from within the isolated environment of the nearly covered pit. From within the pit the stage voices were subdued by the covering and any attempt to monitor the stage sound by feeding it into the pit would have produced uncontrollable howling from feedback. Everyone was isolated but the sound engineer in the theater who did his best to reassemble disembodied sounds into some kind of acoustic whole. That such an attempt should prove less than successful should be no surprise. That the attempt continues to be made in present day theatrical productions in the face of such disastrous results is at least unfortunate and wasteful. Good sound engineer/musicians with good ears like Phil Ramone continue to work in circumstances like these but their perspective seems to get skewed and their normal judgments disturbed by the continual struggle to dominate an obstinate and misapplied technology.

Much of the motivation for these experiments comes from the economic considerations involved in trying to recoup investments in expensive productions that must be installed in theaters big enough to promise the possibility of sufficient financial return but too big to provide a practical acoustical environment. Much the same situation exists in contemporary orchestra halls and opera houses. If they are big enough to house an audience that can pay its share of the expenses of the concerts, they are too big to provide an environment where those performances can be heard well.

Recordings are wonderfully useful artifacts in modern life. Technology has its benefits; all the more so when it is understood to be what it is in comparison with the reality that exists in its absence. A film of a sunset reproduces a limited memory of the event, not the experience. A recording of the sound of an orchestra, received through microphone diaphragms, reduced to electrical impulses (no matter whether analog or digital) and squeezed through wires and circuits to be later reassembled in the air through loudspeakers, can only be a distorted representation of reality. When it is useful to store as many elements of the event as we can in a recording, all of those technological devices become necessary. When the actual event is taking place, it is ludicrous to believe that the horrendous distortions inherent in even the best "sound reinforcement" devices can be used to improve communication. Would we choose to substitute a loud kiss over the telephone if a soft real one were available?

Chuck Israels
November 1992