LOOKING FOR MR. GOOD MIKE

AUDIO isn't a big enough word for the whole of sound reproduction as we know it now and see it still developing with such incredible speed. Is it enough to say that the world has been changed? That's a platitude. We must bring things to discussable size, like an astronomer searching among galaxies.

Take the human voice and the microphone, for instance. No, not the technological history of the mike-the effects of it. I've been reading a novel set in ancient Greece, well over 2,000 years back, where the formal outdoor theater and written-out play seem to have originated. No mikes! A marvelously skilled technique of vocal projection superbly aided by surrounding architectural reflection and a slanted bowl for the audience, allowing thousands to hear every word. An old story! My last on this concerned Saint Bernard preaching the Crusade from a French cliff-top to a hundred thousand or so in a valley below. They got the message, all of them, or so we are told.

What people don't know about mike technique today is hard to believe, considering all those video interviews we see every day with handheld mikes switching back and forth and a smooth and easy volume level. I've seen kids do it with play mikes. Adults make a mess of it, with hideous blasts and near silences... . I am recently back from a camp-in that included a variety of events requiring microphone usage. There was, for instance, a big amateur stage show a la Hollywood and a character named Lola, all flounces and hairdo, who walked around on stage and up the aisles (indoor gym) with a wireless mike in hand--complete with big pop screen--as she interviewed many in the audience. She waved that mike around as though it were a pearl-handled fan, the kind that folds up and then, flip, opens into some gent's happy face. Very Spanish. Great fun to watch. But the sound! Lola would sometimes remember, and whisk the mike up to her capacious mouth; a roar like 50 lions would emerge. But then away went the mike off to one side, coquettishly. A mumble was all we heard. The interviews, of course, were unintelligible, but Lola wasn't aware.

The Boss Man who ran the whole camp was no performer, just a high-level manager and organizer, but his mike technique was faultless. Every word of his frequent announcements was clear. Same mike, merely moved to the huge dining hall, where announcements were made at meals.

The most insidious effect, if I may say so, that mike technique has brought upon us is a disastrous loss of the normal connection between the human voice and its environment of the moment, any moment. Even with a mike. One of the curious effects that the mike novice discovers when he makes a public speech is that he cannot hear his own sound. Behind the "public address" mike, whether at a football stadium or an indoor banquet, a man (or a woman) simply loses touch with the acoustic surrounding. At first he simply does not know whether he is speaking (or singing) loudly or softly, whether he is inaudible or perhaps overloading the ears in the far-distant areas. It is a thing we must learn--and do. Some of us.

I hate to say so, but the art of singing minus the mike is in a somewhat sorry state these days, as compared to the same in pre-mike times. It's the same story. In the old times, a singer learned not merely to project a loud sound, to fill up a big space beautifully, but also to harmonize that voice with each and every space, according to its requirements--to resonate, if you will, for the optimum coupling between the sound producer and the spatial receiver of that sound. Opera singers well into this century were as skilled as the old Greek actors in this sort of voice control. If singing in a small hall, the performer sang the same music but with less power--for the same effect. If singing Lieder, solo songs, in somebody's private music room, the performer expertly shrank his voice to its most minuscule beauty. Some singers still do! And if he had to fill an opera house five times as big as any house in the style and time of the opera he was singing, then he bellowed an enormous blast. Some singers can do that beautifully.

All you see, without microphone. The entire range of classical music was designed by the composers to suit the acoustic requirements of their period and of the medium. Operas began small, no more than solo voices with continuo accompaniment, a few soft instruments. Operas grew larger and larger through no less than almost four mike-less centuries. Vocal technique increasingly went for sheer volume, very much at the expense of the precision that was the wonder of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Today, if the soundman has a larger hall to fill, he throws in more amp power, and maybe more speakers. In the past we used more vocal potency. Alas, we still do.

The mike has invaded musical comedy and the Broadway show, thus altering what once was really a popular kind of classical music into a more contemporary but much more raucous and noisy format. Not loud voices! Loud amplification. A very big difference. On the other hand, big operas--those that come before a handful of really contemporary works--are still performed largely in the outward manner of the past, if in generally much larger places. No mikes. Pure vocal (and instrumental) volume, controlled at the source, not at the console or mixing panel. It's another world, and becomes a more difficult one every day. Shall we use mikes for old operas (and much else)? If we do, we make a drastic, fundamental change in the production of sound. Most singers trained for opera (i.e., loud) simply cannot sing into a close mike.

If a pop singer's mike goes dead, there is no sound at all beyond a few feet. Pop styles are designed nowadays for microphones, and the singers design their voices for the same. No power. Leave that to the electronics.

But a "classical" singer still spends hours, days, years, developing the loudest, most forceful tones the teacher can get out of him with, hopefully, respectable sonic quality.

What does an opera-trained singer do in a small listening space-I mean, live? My experience is that most sing just as loudly as in the opera house.

Indeed, most of the music they perform is designed for such singing and simply cannot be sung at half volume any more than you can shout at half volume. Richard Wagner's operas are perhaps the ultimate in this respect.

(And he also knew wonderfully well how to use sotto voce--half-voice--effects, almost whispered yet still in song, and was still able to fill a big house.) This Wagnerian tradition was built largely because of the heroic qualities of his characters, not ever just ordinary people. They were bigger than life; they must sing the same.

Richard Strauss, Wagner's follower, used even bigger orchestral effects and voices on the same scale, but, progressively, his people became more realistic, intimate, human, and his writing for them the same.

Where Wagner's gods and supermen orated, at enormous length, Strauss gives his people real conversations, up to speed, yet couched in music. This opera, you see, is heading toward the contemporary feeling and the microphone, though Strauss surely did not realize it nor, I expect, would have admitted it. Good Strauss singers are rare. They use no mikes, and yet their sound must have a close-up quality that belongs in our microphone age.

One of the curious eras in microphone technique came at the very beginning of the electronic age in recording. Audio engineers, after 1925 or so, were so fascinated with the things a microphone could do that they overdid, applying what amounted to pop technique to music inherently unsuitable for it. The great Kirsten Flagstad's first American recordings were that way. Listening, you hear the lady's tonsils, loud and clear. Every sniff is audible, remarkably hi-fi. And the orchestra, supposedly all-enveloping and bathing the voice in its wonderful sound, is so far away and faint that its impact is about that of a radio ad background. How we do get mixed up! It seems to me that TV, now expanded to video, has brought a whole new range of useful mike techniques to go with its pictures. That man in the furniture ad, for instance, who ambles slowly from the far background to head and-shoulders position while making his pitch: Perfect audio balance and liveness, natural volume. No mike visible. In his hair? In a pocket? It is miking perfection, compared to Lola.

Indeed, there is here an ever widening difference between professional and amateur. The general public simply cannot do a good mike job, cassette machine or camcorder, with the knowledge and equipment it has.

Whereas almost anybody can turn out good color pix, microphoning is a very pro skill. Like the art of the speaking voice in old Greece.

Thettalos, a Greek professional actor of mature fame, has been caught carrying spy messages, is defending himself before the King, who is ready to kill him on the spot. I give you one memorable sentence from this account: "In his resonant voice, which could have reached an audience of twenty thousand, now pitched perfectly to the room, he delivered his supplication." Thettalos was pardoned. He didn't need a mike.

(by: EDWARD TATNALL CANBY; adapted from Audio magazine, Dec. 1991)

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