Was driving this morning and listening to Performance Today on my local NPR affiliate, and there was a performance of Beethoven’s String Quartet #13, and I could not believe the recording. Not because it was exceptional, but because I think the quartet playing it all had bronchitis. The entire thing was filled with heavy breathing interrupted with the occasional muffled cough and hacking wheeze. It sounded like Chris Farley having sex while listening to classical music. Why is it that classical music seems to include this sort of thing far more than other forms of music?
Also, somewhat related. I was driving through the country last week listening to PT, completely blissed out, and the EBS test came right in the middle of a piece and it was so damned jarring I almost wrecked my car. Is that really necessary in 2010?
Hunter Gathers
Without it, tornados would kill a lot more people than they already do. Sure it’s annoying as hell, but most radio stations don’t have people running the board at all times anymore, and is the only way to guarantee that the word gets out when bad weather rears it’s ugly head.
mistermix
Yes:
http://www.slate.com/id/2157395
Brian J
Yes, it is necessary. If we didn’t have it, how else will you know when the Russians/Chinese/Islamofacists are invading?
toujoursdan
I played Oboe and English Horn in orchestras through university and have a lot of recordings with audience noise in them. It’s the nature of the beast. Classical music is generally performed in concert halls and the tradeoff for good acoustics is audience noise. Rock, jazz and other forms of music are often performed in other venue types, tend to be louder than classical and can mask it out better.
QDC
@Hunter Gathers:
I think the question is not so much whether we need an EBS as whether we need to test it every week. At least where I live the sirens wind up every Wednesday at noon. I hadn’t spent much time thinking about it, but with all the infrastructure we let crumble in this country, it’s a bit amusing that the EBS is one thing we make damn sure works.
Zifnab
Well, you’ve got a lot of woodwinds and brass horns. They’re all air-powered musical instruments. So if the mics are positioned badly, you get not only the trill whistle of the flute or the brassy blare of the trombone, you get poor folks who had to blast a gale force wind through their instruments gasping for the next breath.
There’s a trick called circular breathing that circumvents this, but it’s incredibly difficult – the sort of thing the best performers in the world work to master.
LarsThorwald
And what’s the deal with these airline peanuts?
John Cole
@mistermix: I’m not asking if we need the EBS- I’m asking if we need those annoying tests.
MattF
Your hearing is too acute. You should go to several loud concerts– the deafening effect is temporary the first few times, but after a while it’s good and permanent.
Bill E Pilgrim
Because with acoustic instruments to mic them loudly enough for it to sound that loud to you, you also pick up audience coughing. If Led Zeppelin were playing then you wouldn’t hear the coughing, in other words, but neither would the people coughing, along with anything they might be saying. “WHAT?” “I SAID, ‘GESUNDHEIT’!” “WHAT??”
There are better and worse systems for recording of course and the big expensive ones in concert halls can avoid the problem better, but you might have been hearing a concert in a small church or community center or who knows where.
It can often sound like an uncanny amount of coughing and wheezing by the way but that’s just the weird effect of actually focusing on the normal percentage of any group that size who will cough.
Add to that it being a winter in Budapest in 1951, and it can become almost comic:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuFwt66Vr6U
cleek
@Zifnab:
Kenny G, too.
Bill E Pilgrim
@John Cole: I think they should just add coughing to the music as the emergency test. If you hear the coughing, then the system works.
The Moar You Know
Typical Dumbocrat terrorist sympathizer, trying to lull the populace into a false sense of security.
If you’re not afraid, you’re not American.
toujoursdan
Circular breathing is tough. You essentially store air in your cheeks which is blown into the instrument as you take a breath through your nose.
I could never do it without affecting my pitch and timbre.
Balloon-Juice Platinum Member
Just you wait until you see those ACORN black helicopters and then you won’t be asking about EBS anymore.
mistermix
@John Cole: My guess is that the alert you hear is part of an end-to-end test (i.e., authorities sending a test signal to the radio station). Only authorities (not radio stations) can initiate the real thing:
http://www2.eou.edu/~mmustoe/rw.html
Obviously, if it’s just a test at the radio station, it’s not a quality test.
Rosalita
@John Cole:
yeah, and those jarring tests right in the middle of a program. why can’t they fuck up a commercial instead?
BenA
Also… I’m thinking their might not be quite the budget to post process the music and remove some of the more annoying sounds that there is for your regular old rock/pop music… not to mention there tends to be a certain segment of the classical listening world that would look at me with horror when I mention maybe perhaps applying some digital processing to a beloved classical recording.
cervantes
Jazz pianist Keith Jarrett grunts and groans like a calliope.
Playing a wind instrument requires a lot of gasping, and the instruments also make extraneous noise as keys slap shut, little squeaks happen from edges of reeds, etc. You can’t normally hear this in a concert hall but when a microphone is right in the player’s face, it all gets on the recording.
Seanly
I thought there was a new EBS system that is more automated. If the station has switched to that then monthly testing is not required. IIRC most TV stations and larger market radio stations have switched but the smaller market & NPR stations haven’t switched. Or I could’ve dreamed all that info…
FCC controls the system. I recommend you search the internet for additional data.
Looks like the newer system is under the dreaded FEMA black ops control – http://www.fema.gov/emergency/ipaws/
BenA
@Balloon-Juice Platinum Member:
In my weaker moments I really wish there were ACORN black helicopters to round up some of my crazier melanin-deficient bretherin.
groover
Sounds like the quartet might have been miced too closely. In chamber music where there’s no conductor, the players use all means available to communicate with each other. Eye contact, subtle gesture with body or instrument, and especially breathing, are used to convey beginnings, rubato, cutoffs, etc. A quick inhale can set a tempo and give a downbeat in a conductorless ensemble. All good players breathe with their phrasing even if they don’t play wind instruments.
Jayackroyd
Blame it all on Glenn Gould.
Hunter Gathers
@John Cole:
It’s the only way of knowing that they are working. Since the Telecommunications bill of 1996 (and to a lesser extent, before that) allowed the media conglomerates to consolidate media sources, they have cut back big time on equipment and manpower in order to boost profits. At one of the stations I was news director of back in the mid to late 90’s (I ran the news department for 4 stations of a small conglomerate), our EAS equipment sat in it’s box for 2 years after it was supposed to be installed, and the old EBS box wasn’t properly re-installed after moving all the relay equipment to a cheaper facility. It never kicked on for a year and a half, even during the mandated tests. The building the relay equipment was housed in was unmanned 24/7 except when I had to run out there to reboot the shitty computer the equipment wired through. Since it was a small wattage oldies station that nobody listened too, the only way I found out the EBS wasn’t working was when one of the guys who worked at one of the larger stations (who loved Elvis) told me about it when he tuned in to it during a large hailstorm and never heard it go off. I told my boss and the engineer about it, and it still took them 3 weeks to fix the EBS box and the EAS equipment sat in it’s box for another year. For all I know, it’s still there. So yes, the tests are necessary, if only because our corporate masters are too lazy and callous to make sure their own fucking equipment works. For all intensive purposes, the FCC is non-existent.
R-Jud
@cervantes:
That’s a good way to describe his noises. As it happens, I am listening to Glenn Gould, who was notoriously noisy, right now.
twiffer
at least the cable company does ’em some time after 1AM.
i have pretty much just stopped listening to the radio anyway. clearchannel wiped out the few stations i did listen to years ago. fuck them.
Mike in NC
I read that the Hollywood studio responsible for the idiotic remake of “Red Dawn” is having financial troubles. Good. Maybe the Chinese didn’t feel like bankrolling their crap.
How to you say “Wolverines!” in Mandarin, anyway?
Tattoosydney
That counts as a music thread, so I will drop this here:
Create your own minimalist soundscapes with Pulsate. Click to draw circles and when the circles interact they make sound. With strategic placement of a few circles in the right places, you can make some lovely musical loops. Quite addictive.
Punchy
Just wait until those “tests” are the real thing. True story: driving in a state for the first time, completely clueless to the area….song gets interrupted mid-song (dead ringer for a real event), and the EBS guy’s rattling off the tornado’s path on the radio. Meanwhile, we’re unknowingly driving directly at it, not knowing where these towns are located compared to our intended route. Missed the twister by about 2 minutes. Our moving truck would have been flipped, easily, if we hadn’t slowed down due to the sideways rain.
Also, about 13 years ago, missed another tornado by less than a minute (TV had the exact time it hit a nearby intersection). Must be lucky….
kommrade reproductive vigor
Thank you for that mental image. Please die now.
Got your attention didn’t it? Although I prefer the old-style test where they warned you that it was a test before the test so I would know I didn’t need to pull over and find a ditch or start rounding up cats and head for the basement.
Yeah, I’ve been through a tornado. Yeah, it makes you jumpy.
rachel
OT: the roar of the PUMA is heard in the land again. :p
Eric U.
@Hunter Gathers: seems to me that your story just shows that the tests aren’t actually a test. Where is the feedback that it didn’t work?
John Bird
Um, because they have to mic the instruments and it was probably a live chamber performance?
PeakVT
If you’re not afraid, you’re not
American.a real Merkin.This would be funnier if it wasn’t true.
Davis X. Machina
@rachel: Yeah, they may not be silenced — but what will they do when they’re sedulously ignored?
Judas Escargot
Classical music is generally performed in concert halls and the tradeoff for good acoustics is audience noise.
Audience noise and breathing are also acoustically complex, and difficult to filter out in post-production without ruining the timbre of the classical instrument you’re trying to record.
60Hz guitar hum in a hard rock mix? Cakewalk! Breaths and string squeaks in a mic’ed classical guitar performance? Not so much.
rachel
@Davis X. Machina: I doubt I’ll notice whatever happens enough to find out. I only stumbled across this story by accident.
General Stuck
Obama should cancel all emergencies. That’s what the Bully Pulpit is for.
Indie Tarheel
@Mike in NC:
Probably not entirely accurate, but I found this:
__
狼獾
__
(h/t to my grandnephew LittleMan – he’s a big “Ni-Hao, Kai-Lan” fan and I’m constantly looking up stuff trying to keep up)
vtr
The test was a regularly scheduled weekly or monthly test. Stations are notified by the system well in advance – six months or so – of the precise time they’ll be sent to every station. Stations can choose to delay them for a short time, maybe up to 1/2 hour, and then run them when they won’t interrupt anything really important, like a Beethoven quartet. In order for that to happen, stations must pay attention to the test schedule, and have a human around to delay the test. Unfortunately, the station you were listening to was probably running an automated nationwide classical music service. The genuine alerts cannot be delayed or rescinded, not even by DeGaulle.
Also, everyone knows violins make people sneeze.
Go to your local library, if it hasn’t been closed, and take out another performance of the 13th. Beethoven channeled God writing that one.
maus
@rachel: I appreciate how they discriminate
Cris
A woodwind player does not have to learn circular breathing to keep from gasping. A good player learns early to inhale efficiently — it’s a core skill, you can’t play sustained passages without it. And if keys are slapping shut audibly, you either have shitty technique or you need your instrument tuned up. Key noise is the equivalent of fret noise on a guitar — some can’t be avoided, but most of it is eliminated with practice.
Hunter Gathers
@Eric U.: There was none. Larger stations initiate the tests, and send tones down the line to activate other station’s EBS and EAS boxes, which are supposed to kick on several minutes after they are first initiated from the larger stations. Most large stations don’t give a shit about the smaller stations, and don’t keep track anymore with signal bleed no longer being a problem, with about half of the stations that existed 15 to 20 years ago being wiped out and eliminated in the consolidation maddness. EBS tests were the best way to keep track of signal bleed, as when say the station located at 99.6 would bleed into the station located at 99.2. That isn’t problem anymore outside of the largest markets.
There are several racks of equipment (relays, equalizers, phone patches, dampeners, etc.) in any radio station, no matter the size. The only way to test the equipment, to make sure that it works fully, is to patch them into the sound board, and send them out over the air. The equipment is very sensitive, and tends to get out of whack if you even look at it funny. I once spent a week completely re-wiring a rack of relays for reasons even the engineer couldn’t figure out. It was just cursed.
There probably wouldn’t be a need to broadcast the EAS like they do, but the small and medium markets are nothing like the larger markets. If your shit doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to, one of you competitors will rat you out if you’re in a large market. In the smaller markets, that doesn’t happen, as everybody is doing shit they aren’t supposed to do, to increase profits. Yes, the tests are annoying as all get out, but it shows that the station you are listening to actually gives a shit. Like the parent that nags the shit out of you constantly, they are only doing it because they care.
Cerberus
What others said, classical tracks put on CDs or records tend to (more often than other genres) come from live performances, because the general accoustics of where they are performing the live performances are really good.
Downside is the audience ends up on the track. Second downside? Said audience tends to be on average, much much older than the live versions of other genres. So, live rock will get young people whistling and screaming throughout the track, but live classical will get “the theatre problem” of hearing the 80 year old retirees dance on the edge of death all throughout the performance.
And now you know.
Joe Max
I’m the live recording engineer for the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, and I know the problem – intimately.
I usually find myself praying that we don’t have a significant number of people with respiratory diseases in the audience that night. It is the nature of the beast. Since I’ve been doing this work for a couple of years, I now notice all the extraneous noises in even the most professional symphony recordings.
If the recording engineer is using lots of close-mics, the problem of hearing the breathing of the musicians is significant. But using a small number of area mics is more common for recording classical, if the concert hall has good acoustics. (Luckily, Zellerbach Auditorium at UC Berkeley sounds gorgeous.)
We use a two-mic stereo pickup pattern technique, with the mics suspended in front of the stage about 30 feet apart. The mics are pretty directional, but loud coughing and wheezing in the audience still gets heard if it’s during a quiet passage. Attention classical music fans: if you must cough, try to do it during crescendos! For some reason people tend to wait until the quiet passages.
The other problem I get is not so much the breathing of the wind players, but the clicking of their keys. Flutes can be particularly noisy, because it’s metal on metal, even with the pads it’s louder than other winds. That, and the sound of the string players dropping their bows on the metal music stands, which they often do when they have an extended passage of rests.
As someone else pointed out, it’s pretty much impossible to filter extraneous single noises out of the recordings. I’ve had to digitally filter out the sound of the air circulation system in the hall (when the stage manager forgot to turn it off, which is S.O.P.) but that’s easier because it’s constant on continuous.
Yes, most concert halls turn the air circulation OFF during the music, in case you ever wondered “why is it getting so hot in here…?”
Randy P
There have been classical musicians, most notably pianist Glenn Gould, who sang along (or more accurately, moaned aloud) loudly to their own playing. In Gould’s case at least I believe that there was a limit of tolerance beyond which they considered the recording unusable.
A classical musician friend of mine had a symphony recording he was fond of that he called “the fart of the concertmaster”. As I recall, it did indeed feature a loud fart in the middle of an otherwise quiet passage.
Maybe this is more a part of classical music because classical music is quieter. Or because it’s more likely to use acoustical instruments and microphones with wide patterns that pick up a lot of background.
Edit: Too late to the party as always. I see that Glenn Gould and miking of orchestras have both already been mentioned.
Jeff
@cervantes: IIRC
on many of Glenn Gould’s recordings, you can distinctly hear him humming along with the music.
mitch
Most orchestra recordings are done live, so all the hacking and coughing are from the old farts in the crowd. My girlfriend plays in a symphony, so the times that I’ve attended where they were recording the piece, the announcer/conductor would politely suggest that people try to cough, hack, etc. between pieces.
catclub
@R-Jud:
Please check out Till Fellner’s Well Tempered Clavier.
(Unfortunately only volume 1)
By comparison, Gould sounds like he has wooden fingers.
Fellner sounds like water flowing.
I started out listening to Gould’s Bach, but his singing along is the least of the problems I have with it.
Joe Max
He also bitches and moans incessantly about even the very slightest extraneous noise in the sound system, and has been known to yell at the audience if he thinks they’re not being respectfully quiet enough.
I refuse to do the sound for him anymore at the concert hall where I work.
Michael G
There was a comedian who had a bit about the emergency broadcast system–how, his entire life, he put up with the stupid tests because some day, there would be a national emergency that made use of the system.
And then came 9/11, and nobody bothered to use the emergency broadcast system. What exactly are we saving it for?
luminous muse
Amen to vtr. Quartet no. 13 comes to us from another, better world.
My problem with listening to recordings of the Late Beethoven Quartets is the high violin stuff – it really hurts my rock and roll abused ears. I don’t have the same problem live. Those nasty frequencies must get swallowed by the hall before they get to me.
Ash Can
@Michael G: The EBS gets used here several times a year for weather warnings, and this (the Chicago area) isn’t even in the nation’s most active storm area. It’s also used in the case of child abductions. The EBS is meant to alert the public at large to take immediate action of some kind. In the case of 9/11, what were people supposed to do? I happen to live under one of the approaches to O’Hare, so I kept an eye on the sky, but there wasn’t much else for me to do. The EBS might have come in handy for large urban areas, to evacuate downtowns, but the downside to that could well have been too many people trying to evacuate too quickly in a situation where — unlike in, say, a confirmed missile attack — no one was sure whether those downtown areas were actually at risk.
trollhattan
@cleek:
Kenny G was two years behind me in high school. If only I’d known, he might have had a tragic stairwell “accident.”
Alas, far too late now.
luminous muse
Why do my comments get eaten? Anyway, here it is again: vtr has it right, go listen to this piece of music. It speaks to us from another, better world.
My problem with recordings of the late Beethoven Quartets is the high violin passages – they really hurt my rock-and-roll ruined ears. Fortunately I’ve heard them live a few times, where I don’t have the same problem. I guess the hall eats up the nasty highs (along with my comments.)
tom
And now you can cell phones to the mix of audience noises when some moron doesn’t turn it off in spite of pointed stage announcements.
The worst in my experience was during a performance my choir was giving of the B-Minor Mass when some idiot’s cell phone started ringing during one of the quieter passages.
Sirkowski
For a long time I thought the EBS was for nuclear attack alerts. Got a bit scared one time watching PBS and it wasn’t a test…. :-|
trollhattan
@tom:
True enuf. I also recall when digital watches were first all the rage and attending concerts/movies when a hundred or so hour chimes would go off all across the theater. After the first time you dreaded the top of the next hour, for an hour.
Angela
@Hunter Gathers:
The FCC requires that there be a person present in the sound booth at ALL TIMES, a person who’s been propertly trained in what to do in the case of an emergency.
Accordingly a DJ I know, that requirement has not been lifted.
priscianusjr
I wonder when the spelling “mic” for the short form of the word “microphone” come in. It strikes me as bizarre. The spelling “mic” for a word with a long “i” has no parallel in the English language, as far as I know. In my younger days it was always spelled “mike.”
donr
Once saw an early-January performance of Bruckner’s 4th with the Cleveland Symphony under Dohnanyi. The opening of the symphony is very quiet, with a difficult, high, exposed solo for French horn.
Well, the audience was still settling in and expectorating during the opening bars of the symphony. So Dohnanyi lowered his baton after 30 bars, turned around to glower at the audience, waited for them to stop coughing, and returned to face the orchestra to start the symphony over.
The poor French horn player, who had executed his solo beautifully, suddenly had to repeat the trick. This was cruel. The second time through he dropped clams all over the place – smudged notes, generally unlovely.
So Dohnanyi stopped a second time. Gave the horn player a few moments to collect himself. And started the symphony a 3rd time. The poor horn player somehow managed to struggle through the opening bars, but he was by this point a defeated man probably considering taking vows and leading a life of quiet contemplation.
Dr. Morpheus
@Cris:
Exactly, and as someone who has studio experience (and a brother-in-law who records classical, jazz, rock concerts live all the time) I can assure you that whomever set up the mics did a shitty job.
It is more than possible to get a quality recording of a classical quartet or any relatively quiet acoustic performance without having distracting background noises audible.
If it were possible for me to post examples from my brother-in-laws audio library of past jobs I could give you examples of very small, acoustic, intimate performances that he has recorded that have absolutely nothing but the instrument and/or the singer audible.
He is very, very good but he’s hardly unique. The problem is a sound engineer like him is quite expensive and classical music acts (and the venues that book them), usually don’t the budget to afford someone like my brother-in-law.
Hence the background noises.
Dr. Morpheus
@priscianusjr:
What? You’ve never heard of “Sci Fi”?
Or a “Hi Fi” stereo?
“mike” who? That’s a proper name.
That’s why it’s not spelled that way.
humbert dinglepencker
Welcome to the joy of digital recording. Plus, quartets, especailly string quartets, are often miked very closley. All musicians breathe as a part of both counting and expression; this is a learned and mostly subconcious activity, and not as noticable from an audience position. It can be irritatingly close, depending on the recording, the venue and the player. As most recordings today are live – as a cost saving measure – these noises seem to be more pronounced, and as has been noted, very difficult to remove in post-production without altering the music itself. I can deal with the breathing performing musicians (I am one myself), but I have much more difficulty with tubercular audiences.
luminous muse
My biggest problem recording music as a composer and arranger (not live, but in the studio) has been the oboe. Even the best session players in NY make this popping sound with the keys. It’s very annoying in those quiet passages where you want to evoke that poignant thing the oboe does like no other instrument.
Dead Ernest
Was it the oboe or the bassoon that someone once described as;
“an ill woodwind that no one blows good”?
luminous muse
Ernest, you must either be a classical musician, or know some because you cite what sounds like an authentic “musician joke.” They are always picking on oboists, violists, and sometimes horn players, I don’t why. All those things are impossible to play. Why I play guitar.
asiangrrlMN
@Tattoosydney: Man. I am really digging the circle noise. However, I can’t watch the circles for very long before it starts freaking me out. So, I just listen as I surf and return periodically to add another circle or seven.
We have our tornado sirens tested the first Wednesday of every month. I always wonder what would happen if we actually had a tornado on the first Wednesday of a month.
asiangrrlMN
@Tattoosydney: I just discovered if you put one circle inside of the other (and only have two), there is no sound, and the circles disappear. Won’t do that again!
ChrisNBama
I almost shot soda thru my nose when reading this: DAMN YOU, COLE!!
I’ve had a similar experience recently with my NPR affiliate: During the climax of my beloved Elgar Variations (Variation #10), the Powers That Be interrupted with their weekly EBS test. Scared the shit out of me, then pissed me off…
Felanius Kootea (formerly Salt and freshly ground black people)
@Tattoosydney: Pretty cool.
normasilla
String players breathe as part of musicianship. Without it they would play like robots, and I promise, the “wheeze-free” result would be rather bland. Also, the pick-up for a mic for a violin is about a foot away from the player’s face, and people do have to breathe. If you prefer noise free classical music, you should be listening to the MIDI channel…
Zuzu's Petals
My own NPR pet peeve:
Loud honks and police sirens included in on-air stories. If I am driving, I inevitably jump at the sound.
You’d think they would have thought it through.