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Ron Sherer: From the point of view of the audience
member, and closeness to the singing group and spacing: how close
do you have to be? Well, the conductor is pretty close, probably
the closest; does the conductor hear-obviously the conductor, does
not hear what the audience hears. What is that spacing where the
individual sounds begin to have that blend that you actually want
the audience to hear? Are there troubles in many school auditoria,
etc., about where the singers are and where the audience is and
the effect you want to evoke? Audio
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Evangelos Himonides, London: I would like to agree, this is fascinating
work, I say that as I have a choral conducting background as well,
but I also work as a recording engineer. So many times I have often
been called to combine both knowledges and try to provide a very
good recording, and that is extremely difficult, especially when
you try to record a choir. What I wanted to say is that although
it is extremely important and it’s always great to have research
about placing of singers and spacing between the singers, many times,
that is not always a universal remedy. You also have factors like
the venue; the actual repertoire is extremely important; and the
placement of the listener as well. And how many listeners you have
in the venue is important as well. From the recording engineer’s
perspective, that’s a more chaotic model. And you can tell
that because after recording a choral performance many times from
one song to the other you have to apply different production techniques
- different equalization, different dynamics processing in order
to create a uniform result and compile a cd. I would like to thank
you for your paper and we need to do more research about this. Audio
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Jeannette Lovetri, New York: Forgive me if you said this, I missed
the very beginning of your talk. Does this apply to children’s
choruses also? Audio link. |
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Ray McConnell: For some of your coming up research, I might suggest
you contact barbershop singers. Barbershop singers have been doing
this for ages, and I don’t know if there’s any kind
of definitive studies on this or not. I know as both barbershop
choruses and quartets shuffle people around, there may be somebody
who has done research that would be of benefit to what you are doing.
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Garyth Nair, Drew University: This is not a question, but a story
that goes to your spacing. The most extreme spacing I have experience
was with Robert Shaw, who liked to put us on a stage with 6 feet
around each singer of space. That was so he could walk around and
listen to us while we sang as a chorus. Some of us thought we sang
better in that extreme position than closer together. Audio
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David Howard: Quick comment. I really enjoyed what you said. You
made a point in passing about auditioning, and I think this is a
vitally important point that auditions typically are carried out
with someone singing a solo from a repertoire they wouldn’t
sing in the choir. Do you have any thoughts about how one might
audition in a more practically relevant way to choir singing? Audio
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