Miking fado

I think it was Renee Flemming who challenged any pop star to sing what Renee does as loud as she does -- without a mike. Without doubt, operatic singers have stronger voices; not only because they are better trained, but also because they are selected for the natural gift of powerful voice. (As the size of the opera halls grew, so did the voices).

So, what, one might say, it's just bragging: does not modern electronics erase the difference between a strong and a weak voice?

It doesn't: it is in the nature of the mike that it captures only a certain range of the ambient sound; thereby, per force, even the best, most faithful microphone magnifies only a part of the complete sound -- the part closest to it -- and thereby erases other parts, drowns them out; and thereby distorts the sound. One of the best ways to hear this is to attend a gamelan performance in Bali.

The gamelan is a complex beast, with a great number of instruments, each with different sonority. The traditional setting of the gamelan, with some instruments types in front and others in the back, some to the left and some to the right, has been selected over the centuries, through trial and error, with the intention of producing a certain sound effect, a certain shape of the emanating bubbles of sound, one which had been found optimal. You can hear it clearly if you walk around a playing gamelan: as you circumambulate it, the quality of the sound changes; now you hear some instruments less, others more, though of course you do not hear them individually, but a different way in which their individual sounds merge and clash in a single fabric full of crosscurrents and eddies.

Nowadays, the Balinese gamelan is almost always miked up. Yet, the mikes, supposedly placed "strategically" around the orchestra, are no such thing at all: they distort and flatten the original richness of the sound which you notice immediately the moment there is a power outage in the middle of a concert. The miked up sound may be bigger, but it is thin and tinny by comparison with the real thing. It is no more than its shadow.

Just as the gamelan is a three dimensional object, so is every instrument: there is a reason why no instrument is perfectly symmetrical -- guitars have lobes, the grand piano opens to one side and not the other. The reason why these instruments have been shaped this way was to produce a certain kind of sound melange. If you mike up such an instrument, you are per force miking up only its one side. You get a fraction of the music you were intended to get.

In view of this, it is hard to understand why modern Balinese insist on miking up the gamelan. It is a very powerful instrument, capable of producing huge volumes; and it is almost never played in venues so large that it would not be heard clearly. It is possible, I suppose, that the reason why the Balinese mike up the gamelan is some misguided notion of updating, modernizing, spiffing up the concert. But a more likely cause is the same why Indian classical musicians mike themselves up: it is the damage done to their ears precisely by years of miking up.

Several years ago, I was at a chamber concert in Jaipur -- flute, tabla and the drone. It was played in a small room, at most 80 meters square; three musicians, perhaps 10 or 12 of the audience. Yet, though we could count every hair in their nostrils from where we were sitting, the musicians insisted on miking themselves up and putting up the volume very, very high. Tired of this, I objected. We can hear you perfectly without the mike, I said. Besides, Tansen never needed to be miked up. Shamed, they did try playing without the mikes. But we cannot hear ourselves, said the flutist after trying a few bars. He had lost his hearing.

The problem isn't limited to musicians. Years of exposure to amplified sound -- you notice how high the sound is when a person wearing a walkman walks by -- or a car with its windows closed and the music on high drives by -- have literally made us hard of hearing. Visiting a movie theater in Thailand makes it painfully obvious: I cannot go to cinema there, because even with ear plugs on the sound is too loud for my ears. And here, in Portugal, the problem is also apparent: I had to leave the Grande Matinee do Fado given yesterday at Forum Lisboa in honor of a fado singer who had passed away because the volume was simply too unbearably high. Yet, incredibly, no one in the audience seemed to mind it.

One could say, with Boyle (who imagined that professional divers failed to report increased pressure when making deep dives because they were working class and therefore by definition insensitive) that the audience being working class is rude and possessed of dulled senses only. But these people aren't rude: the more likely explanation to me seems that they too are simply going deaf.

Too bad for the Grande Matinee: there were some 30 second tier musicians there (the superstars -- Mariza, Camene -- being, natch, above a local shindig like this), and the audience was perhaps the most worth watching: it was like a being on The Good Fellows set.

I also noticed the high average age of both singers and the audience: there was hardly anyone under 50. As they say in America, fado is history. Which is of course a very fado sort of thing to be. Soon, we will feel saudade not just for madrugada and perdida and Alfama, but also for fado itself. The stuff the modern stars sing -- the Camenes and the Marizas -- the ones who didn't attend the Matinee -- isn't really fado anymore.

Good thing they stayed away.