The pub was full
and the monitor was quiet.
The engineer had turned it down
after the first squeal,
and nobody wanted to be the one
who asked for it back.
So the singer sang
without hearing much of herself.
She felt fine.
She told you after
that she had been
singing gently all night.
The recording said otherwise.
Every chorus a little sharp.
Every long note
pushed at the top.
By the last set,
a rasp in the voice
that took three days to go.
Here is the mechanism.
In 1909
a French ear doctor
called Étienne Lombard
noticed that people
raise their voices in noise
without deciding to.
Louder,
higher,
longer vowels.
It is a reflex.
You cannot switch it off
by trying,
and you do not feel it happening.
What you feel
is that you are being normal,
because your body
is quietly working
to keep yourself audible
to yourself.
On a loud stage
with a weak monitor,
that reflex does the singing.
The guitarist turns up,
the drummer digs in,
and the voice pushes harder
to stay on top,
while the singer still believes
she is holding back.
Pitch goes first.
Pushed voices drift sharp,
and a singer who cannot hear the pitch
cannot pull it back.
So telling her
to sing softer
does nothing.
She thinks she already is.
Fix the hearing,
not the singing.
In ear monitors,
even a cheap wired pair,
put the voice inside the head
and take the room out.
No in ears,
then one ear plug.
Blocking one ear
makes your own voice
louder inside your skull,
which is why singers
press a finger to one ear
in a loud room.
Ask for less of everything else
in the monitor
before asking for more voice.
And ask the band to come down,
because every instrument that rises
is a hand on the singer's back,
pushing.
Effort is not something
you can judge from the inside.
The only person
who knows how hard you are singing
is the one listening to the tape
the next morning.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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