In Opera as Opera, I write about perceiving a tendency to “coast” by singers of the New York City Opera during the period when their sound was being “enhanced” by a system of electronic reinforcement. Singers whose voices were none too present in the house to begin with were now granted permission—by the above-described feedback loop, if not by their coaches and conductors—to ease up. While I could not “prove” that this was happening in any individual case, I was quite sure, being familiar with many of the voices under normal acoustical conditions, that it was happening in the aggregate, and the result was enough of a slackening in vocal energy to contribute to an already-pervasive sense of performances that were just sliding uneventfully by. ^(I)

Relaxation, casualness, the possibility of effortless, intimate-sounding communication under public conditions without the technical expertise with which the best classical singers convey these illusions, are the messages of the microphone to the singer or speaker, and these messages are sent in the first moments of experience with the medium. And while I think some classical singers recognized this and began to exploit it quite early on, perhaps the first to turn it into a new kind of singing identity was Bing Crosby. Already moderately successful as a vaudevillian, singing not exactly as a tenor (he never had access to that full range) but in a tenorish manner, and at times using a megaphone to help carry his sound in larger theatres, he almost immediately recognized the microphone’s potential for new interpretive possibilities and stylings, by means of which he could establish, via the rising media of electronic recordings, radio, and sound movies, an unprecedented persona—now soothing, now confiding, now lilting or swinging up-tempo—that would make use of elements of classical, pop, and folk singing, yet be something quite distinct from any or all of them. And the beauty part: this could be done without trying to sustain a high tessitura, without a megaphone, and with, overall, a great deal less physical effort. He could sing with a pleasing light baritone in a bass-baritone range, and create a captivating timbral palette with a minimum of resonantal resource.  And so he ” . . . collaborated with the electric current as if he were romancing a woman . . . reinventing popular music as a personal and consequently erotic medium.” ^(II)