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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. :)
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. :)
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Date: Tuesday, 31 May 2005 02:28 pm (UTC)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.