From a trend perspective, I think it’s important to understand that the primary trend is that both our younger and older audiences are becoming progressively more deaf (due in large part to the ubiquitous of noise, headphone listening and television in our lives), which is an alarming trend, and active listeners like you (and me) are decidedly in the minority.

Oddly enough, sound design in the theater is emerging as a force of encouraging active listening (which by definition requires subtler and more natural amplification levels) - check out this article from the Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2008/oct/03/theatre.sound.design

To address your question more directly, however, as to the cause of why there is this perceived default in the industry that we “need” a microphone to have music heard these days: That impulse comes primarily from the audience and non-technician administration, not from the artist or sound engineer. My belief as a theater educator (I teach at the high school, junior high and college levels) is that we should be a lot more suspect of using amplification in our schools. Nearly every school that still teaches students theater are scarily reliant, even desperately reliant, on amplification to showcase their students to parents INSTEAD of teaching kids to project.

To make matters worse, schools have been de-prioritizing building acoustic spaces and instead create multi-use gymnasiums that create greater need for amplification. I did a walk through this week of a Chicago Public School that has this need to hear their students, and the primary difficulty is not one of equipment - it’s that their space is built with parallel brick walls so that the space can be used both as a concert hall and a basketball court. That architecture creates decreased intelligibility as the sound bounces back and forth between the walls. That creates a greater perceived need for amplification among administrators, teachers, and parents. Sound designers can’t overcome that kind of political pressure to do the right thing I can’t fight that trend without the support of a majority of parents. I’m just a sound engineer.

Since PA systems were introduced to schools a few decades ago, students have been afforded fewer opportunities to develop their own projection skills. What a great example of how the gradual defunding of arts education in schools has reverberating negative effects, no?

Vocal projection is no longer a priority in ANY kind of acting training, and I’m including many conservatory programs in that statement as well.

So as our audience gets deafer, our performers are getting quieter.

As someone on the front lines, It’s a no-brainer that this is a dangerous trend, both for our hearing and the future health of theater. Our performers should be capable of ANYTHING, let alone simply projecting to the back of an acoustic house. I’m not here to defend this trend of louder and louder shows in perpetuity - that’s not good for us, not good for our hearing. I’d like to encourage a trend of more active rather than passive listening in the younger generation. And frankly I do that to the best of my ability when I am empowered to make those decisions with my own students and in my own designs. I am a huge fan of subtlety as a method of retraining audiences to hear more actively.

My point here is that blaming the sound engineers and designers of the world every time a show is too loud is NOT going to solve the problem. We WANT to address this problem, because we are all active listeners and our equipment frankly works better when the volume is down and the performers are projecting healthily.

Your and my energy should not be used to level blame. Our energy is better spent working to educate each other and new audiences that there are other ways to listen.

Instead, I recommend that you go to the schools in your area and tell them to turn off their PA systems and convince the PTA that training vocalists is what we should be doing rather than spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on sound systems that schools are not equipped to use.

I think the audience should also realize that they are entitled to actively engage with people making decisions about programming and what to produce in our theaters and try to convince them that there are more people like you who are active listeners. Because the data that they’re seeing may not be supporting that claim, and they’re in the business of survival, not protecting our hearing.

And to get back to why I wrote this post, I’d like theater journalists to accept a little bit more responsibility for investigating trends like this - enough to understand WHY they are caused. Because journalists ultimately are more capable than all of us to direct attention where attention needs to be paid. And in this case, it’s just not my decision, and I should not be given credit or blamed as I was by Deanna’s post.

That is not how theater is made, and Deanna knew that, and if anyone wants change to happen (as you and I both do), we have to know whose door to knock on.