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.
Have you ever been to a concert before?
F**k off and stay at home and listen to the CD if you wish.
Khaled is a fantastic performer and his concerts are notable for the fantastic musical improvisations and his showmanship.
What is the point of going to a concert if it sounds the same as the CD. the whole point is that it is different. the whole point is that it is a show.
You are so posh, white and barbican-esque – i pity you for having such little soul. you have no rai spirit, so please never turn up to a rai concert again.
Read an interesting article recently about how CDs are getting louder too: http://music.guardian.co.uk/pop/story/0,,1992465,00.html
Thanks for your comments! I would think that the “loud = exciting” connection you describe plays a big role in live concerts.
Two comments. When running an event for my company about 10 years ago, we hired a club DJ to provide entertainment. After dinner when the dancing started, the music was so loud that it was painful even standing in the hall with the doors to the large banquet room (complete with stage, etc.)closed. When I asked him why he was playing the music so loud he said that if he didn’t, it would kill the party. People would not be as excited as they were. But it did turn it down at my request—and sure enough, the crowd started slowing down. People seem to equate “loud” with “exciting” so we had him turn it back up again and the party picked up. That’s one explanation as to why it must be so loud. Of course, “loud” is relative.
A second explanation comes from the Edward Tufte CD site you gave the URL for. He alludes to this and some people above have alluded to it though not said in some many words. The brain makes dynamic decisions based on relative rather than absolute levels (sound, light, weight, whatever). Just as a “high key (80-90% of the objects in the picture in a narrow band close to white) needs a “black” dot to establish dynamic range. Similarly, a low key (80-90% close to dead black) requires a white dot. In the absence of these dynamic markers, both types of pictures are perceived as nondescript gray.
So it is with music, there needs to be a “softest and a loudest” to establish dynamic range. Also, listeners are conditioned to “building to a crescendo” rather than “falling to a decrescendo” sso a piece in that starts out relatively soft has crated the “softest” marker and also has “somewhere to go.” Crescendo is exciting; decrescendo is calming and, hopefully provides the introduction to the next crescendo—or the end of the song. Tempo is subject some similar constraints. The beginning of a song establishes the tempo—or the minimum tempo to which it rises in the main body of the piece. Going the other way leaves the listener feeling like the song never gets “off the ground.” It’s as though the entire song is one long “ending.” Extended decrescendo is boring. Eventually the piece just dribbles away. Establishing a new dynamic range or tempo requires a break in the musical phrasing. And a final note, by the time you feel pain it’s too late. At least a small amount of damage is done; some of the hair-like nerve cells of differing lengths and thicknesses (which affects the resonant frequency) in the inner ear are destroyed—usually the short, thin ones responsible for high frequency hearing—never to return. It is probably true that rock sound engineers are all partially deaf—especially in the high frequencies.
For a discussion of human hearing with minimal technical terminology try this URL:
http://www.glenbrook.k12.il.us/GBSSCI/PHYS/Class/sound/u11l2d.html
The following is a paragraph discussing the specific function of the inner ear from this website:
“The inner ear consists of a cochlea, the semicircular canals, and the auditory nerve. The cochlea and the semicircular canals are filled with a water-like fluid. The fluid and nerve cells of the semicircular canals have no role in the task of hearing; they merely serve as accelerometers for detecting accelerated movements and assisting in the task of maintaining balance. The cochlea is a snail-shaped organ which would stretch to approximately 3 cm. In addition to being filled with fluid, the inner surface of the cochlea is lined with over 20,000 hair-like nerve cells that perform one of the most critical roles in our ability to hear. These nerve cells have a differ in length by minuscule amounts; they also have different degrees of resiliency to the fluid that passes over them. As a compressional wave moves from the interface between the hammer of the middle ear and the oval window of the inner ear through the cochlea, the small hair-like nerve cells are set in motion. Each hair cell has a natural sensitivity to a particular frequency of vibration. When the frequency of the compressional wave matches the natural frequency of the nerve cell, that nerve cell will resonate with a larger amplitude of vibration. This increased vibrational amplitude induces the cell to release an electrical impulse which passes along the auditory nerve towards the brain. In a process which is not clearly understood, the brain is capable of interpreting the qualities of the sound upon reception of these electric nerve impulses.”
That last sentence by itself makes it worthwhile to preserve your hearing because there isn’t likely to be any to “fix” it once it’s gone.
i love loud music if you dont like it leave!
I too think concerts are too loud, both stadium and club. It is all relative; if it starts off too loud, then it has to stay there. More punch could be had from finding a loudness sweet spot, not exceeding it, and a much wider palette of timbre color could be had as a result. The after party DJ in the above post was a bit daft; if he had just started quieter, people would have been just as excited. But once it started out so loud, he couldn’t turn it down beause by then it would be perceived as too quiet.
As a drummer too, I really wish drums wouldn’t be mic’s in a small enough room. Not only does it drive all the levels too high, but it results in losing most of the really great sounding acoustics of a well-tuned and well-played kit. All of the drum parts end up sounding the same from band to band.