We’ve got several CDs of Khaled. I like them for his voice, and the swing and rhythm of the music. Much of it is very “dancable”, but at the same time the rhythms are more than the simple ONE-two-THREE-four of western pop.

So I thought I’d really enjoy him in concert this evening. I enjoyed it so little that it made me wonder about things.

#1: The setup.
On the CDs he’s often accompanied by only two or three instruments – acoustic guitar + accordeon for example, or drums + violin + piano. His voice gets a lot of space, and has a lot of depth.
Today, he was backed by lute, base guitar, 2 electric guitars, one whole rock-style drum set, one hand drum, two keyboards, and a 3-man brass section. His voice had two layers of effects (vibratos and echo) and during some songs, one of the keyboard players was doing more singing than Khaled himself. The net effect was that his singing got blended into a general mass of sound and didn’t stand out, and it all sounded more like a standard rock concert than rai.

Does his voice no longer work on its own – has he lost it? Or is this an attempt to capture larger Western audiences by adapting the style to what the average European is used to?

#2: The lighting.
A floodlight of pure white, aimed at the faces of the audience, and about 4 times larger and stronger than anything aimed at the stage. Not just a little spotlight, this was so bright that it made my eyes water even when I closed them; I had to block it with my hand. What does a lighting designer think when doing something like this? “Let’s weed out the weak ones?”

#3: The volume.
Start out somewhat loud-ish. Turn it up. (We don earplugs.) Turn it up some more. And then a little bit more. Until it got to the point where it we found it physically painful, couldn’t stand it any more, and walked out.

This was even more of a surprise because the Barbican can usually be relied on to provide good (or at least reasonable) sound quality – unlike the South Bank Centre (Royal Festival Hall / Queen Elizabeth Hall) that we’ve stopped going to for concerts, because their sound been bad far more often than good.

This is not the first time we leave a concert because it actually hurts, so we’ve asked ourselves the same questions before.
How can everybody stay there and seem to enjoy it? Are they all half deaf, since they’ve been hearing music at this volume for years? Do they hear but don’t mind?

And more importantly, why is it done this way? Do people like it? Are the sound engineers deaf themselves? Or does everybody in the audience have tiny tinny speakers at home, so that they don’t know what music sounds like when it’s good – when the sound is well balanced and the volume is appropriately loud?

So I Googled for a bit (“concert too loud”). The most informative page I found was Edward Tufte commenting on the same issue on his web site (which has a whole lot of other interesting stuff too). Here are some of the responses:

The stage foldback (or monitor) system is independent of the main sound system and creates an intentionally different mix (often a separate one for each member of the band). The level is often extremely high to get control of the mix (eg if you have a double Marshall stack right next to you, the vocals in the foldback have to be loud enough to get above the guitar level). This does mean the house system (the audience’s) has to be loud enough to get above any ‘spill’ from the foldback system.

I had an interaction with a sound engineer setting up a performance. I expressed my concern over the high sound levels. He reassured me that his group had found that if the levels started low and then gradually increased, the congregation is not aware of the high levels of exposure.

In my rock club experiences, the sound engineer is typically the deafest person in the room. The engineers have subjected themselves to more loud music over the years than even the band members since many of them are “house” engineers or, if touring with bands, are out in front of the band night after night, soaking up the decibels. The ubiquity of “treble creep” is overcompensation caused by hearing that is literally notched out by damage in the higher tonal ranges. This explains the excruciating sharpness so common in live rock audio mixes these days.

I think another factor here is key, the specious practice of amplifying the drum kit. I think this got started when rock bands began playing arenas, but it then became fashionable to do this in even the most intimate of clubs. For anything but the most expansive club, the typical rock drummer is already playing at ear-splitting levels without any amplification whatsoever. Amping it just makes it worse, and a byproduct is that all the other instruments have to turn up to compete.

And a related comment regarding sound quality (from a standup comedian):

It is harder to be funny in a room with a very high ceiling – because the all-important start-up laughter from a small part of the audience has little contagion effect with the rest of the audience. The start-up laughter at a remark takes several seconds to go up to the high ceiling and come back down, too faint and too late to reach the yet-to-be amused members of the audience. The Comedy Connection has a low ceiling for good reason.

All quite interesting. I think the only conclusion from this is that in the future I will think twice before buying tickets for a concert by one of the big-name artists. The less mass-market ones are likely to care more about sound quality.

Today, we went home and enjoyed Khaled on CD instead.