The Story Lives in the Room Where the Sound Is Made
Live Maria Roggen
The classical singing technique has developed from a necessity to project the sound of the voice into large halls - in harmony and balance with powerful, overtone-rich orchestras and grand pianos. Modern microphone singing projects the closer, lighter vocal sound and articulation into a tiny membrane in front of the singer's mouth (almost like an ear drum), and from there lift it through cables into a sound amplifying system, which mixes and projects all the sounds out to the listener, wherever they may be. The romantic song compositions are composed with the classical singing technique in mind. My use of voice and diction has developed in an intimate collaboration with microphones.
Sound-in-room experiment, preliminary project, May 2019:
Ingfrid and I are performing in a chamber hall. Asle* has set up one speaker, at a carefully measured distance right behind me. That's all, the grand piano is not amplified. The goal today is to create the illusion that my voice, like the grand piano, sounds «naturally acoustic» in the room. I therefore place the microphone far enough away from my mouth for the close sounds not to sound «unnaturally» loud. I struggle to find the balance. My usual ways of pronouncing or projecting sound don't suffice, and I don't want to shout, or to spit consonants. The result is a kind of in-between, poor, little, girlish sound, which only reaches halfway out into the room, and in no way matches the richness of the grand piano. The audience cannot hear the lyrics properly. A woman stands up and asks me to turn up the volume.
Sound-in-room experiment, April 2022:
Ingfrid and I are rehearsing in a black box theatre. The dogma of illusory acoustic sound has been abandoned, in favor of an amplified setup: my singing microphone is at a normal distance, and several stereo pairs on the grand piano. Asle has set up a rig of four speakers – two behind us and two above us – and he has delayed the sound in two of them to compensate for physical distance. Not the usual PA set-up with separate stage and hall, but a holistic space, with sliding transitions where «everything» sounds equally «near» for «everyone». The setup gives my voice a new kind of presence in the room, an expanded scope. Carefully adjusted compression of the various piano microphones brings Ingfrid's small, artful nuances on the piano forward and convey them to the centre of the black box. I feel that our actual playing, what we shape in our own close sound world, is equally distributed around the room.
Sound-in-room experiment, August 2022:
Ingfrid and I are on stage in a large, empty hall. Asle adjusts his way into extracting the essence of our sound. The same thing happens as in the black box theatre, but in a larger format: something physical builds up, a connection between the sound formation in my voice and the room. Ingfrids and my sounds lie floating in the middle of the huge hall. I feel in control, my smallest s can be modulated, any adjustment of the larynx, any slight shift in overtones, is conveyed right out to the hall, while I am in the middle of my own sound. Asle has conjured: the room feels like an extension of mine and our impulses. One word can suddenly contain a story, in high-resolution, lifted out of its linear form and into a three-dimensional space.
Klang. Klang? Klang. Klaaang-ng-ng-ng
String to string to strrrrngh
*Asle = Asle Karstad, sound designer with unique expertise in the amplification of
acoustic instruments – collaborative partner throughout our project
