Yesterday

[da]

Before melted_snowball's concert yesterday, I hung out with my friend and former co-worker mynatt and his mom.

...Did you know that for large enough churches or other classical music venues, musicians who are up in a balcony or otherwise far from the conductor basically can't rely on the sound of their choirmates at all? The speed of sound will throw things off badly enough to make a mess of things unless you rely on visual cues.

I just did the calculations (actually, google did). Say a musician is 140 feet (42 meters) from the conductor. If a run of 1/8th-note beats happen to be 1/8-second each, that poor musician is hearing everything a whole beat behind everyone else.

Cool.

After the concert, I got a few photos of the spem in alium score. The conductor's looked like regular sheet music, but about twice as tall. The chorus's has 8 different versions of course, one for each chorus section; each has a compressed version of the other 7 sections, and the 5 parts in their own section. I love the notes this chorister put at the front of theirs...






...If you look really closely, someone has inserted a 'V' before Alium. Now we know what some of the choristers think of the piece. :)

Comments

[arcticturtle.livejournal.com]

Could you lessen the speed-of-sound problem by pressurizing the performance venue?

OH, that score looks hard. That "Don't Panic!" note must be very necessary.

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

Even if you could (and not kill the performers...) it'd be totally hopeless. Regardless of whether the choir is singing what they're hearing or what they're seeing, the typical case where this matters is in antiphonal pieces (like Spem).

And very often, the audience is between the two (or more) choirs. So it's impossible that they will all hear the music in sync; there will be some people who are closer to one choir than the other.

Conveniently, your ear works things out, and it'll sound fine. The human brain is so cool!

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Could you lessen the speed-of-sound problem by pressurizing the performance venue?

Yes, according to yon wikipedia.
Though it would be easier to make the problem worse, by elevating the performance venue to 10-20 thousand meters, where the speed of sound is a measly 295 m/s.

In order to reduce the severity of the problem by a similar amount (45 meters/second), the air temperature would need to be raised to 90 degrees Celcius, where the speed of sound is a convenient 385 m/s.