With the first sung tone, the vocalist’s effort begins to incorporate the feedback loop that always runs between his or her vocal actions and the resonance characteristics of the space: live or dead, cold or warm, bright or dark? What combination of these? This is again an interaction whose effect the singer tries to disregard if the breaking news is bad, and to turn to advantage if it’s good; and again the practiced singer will be trying to obey an inner governance established by the cumulative knowledge of how it feels when the voice is working efficiently and effectively, more than how it sounds coming back in a particular place and time. The nervous system, however, never clocks out. The sensory/motor, voluntary/autonomic interchange is always active, and the myriad little adjustments to it, as well. So while the singer is always trying to follow the admonition “Just sing the way you always sing,” it’s impossible that the acoustical properties of the space not play a part. As the soprano Amy Burton puts it in Heidi Waleson’s new book on the New York City Opera ^(I), “The hall is the rest of your instrument.” And the singer will always be trying, consciously or otherwise, to tune and focus that instrument to the sound he or she hears as his or her best. The whole body—its state of relative tension or relaxation, its coiled preparation for greater or lesser effort, the adjustments of its respiratory activity—participates in this ongoing interaction. And the eye/ear relationship continues to send impressions that reassure, or not (the big house that feels warm and easy; the small one that feels like a wall of cotton).

If a microphone is present, the impression of the space and its acoustical implications does not go away (the room is still the room, and the eye confirms that this is the case), but it is put on background, and altered again by the specifics of microphone type and placement. In its most basic conformation, the one encountered from 1925 onward by the first generation of public performers and orators to make use of a mike, and still met with under many circumstances, the mike is a hunk of metal, disc-like or cylindrical, that stands or hangs, or sits on a desk or console, before the vocalist in fixed position and at fairly close range. The eye immediately apprehends it as a rather small target, toward which it seems advisable to direct sound in a narrow stream—a suggestion quite different from that made by a room of any size or shape, or for that matter by the acoustical horn, which looked as if yawning to gather in sound, then funnel it down to cutting-stylus tolerance. A few moments’ experimentation with this device and whatever amplification-and-speaker apparatus it’s connected with is enough to tell the performer that very small changes in position or in vocal amplitude can make very large differences in tonal impact. Only a little more time is necessary to make clear that certain kinds of inflection, mostly within the lower ranges of both pitch and, especially, loudness are not only permissible, but expressively desirable, while those of higher intensity are now of less advantage, and are in any case unnecessary, because electronic energy is now substituting, to a rather astonishing degree, for human energy. Once more, the classically trained, “legit” singer seeks to transcend, to sing beyond the mike to the room, to continue to support and project. But the feedback loop has changed. The return the singer is getting differs in both loudness and quality. And once more, it would be a singer of rare insensitivity who would not in some measure readjust.