A sound engineer observed to me recently that many young singers are not projecting into microphones, even in large venues, presumably because they came of age singing alone for Instagram or TikTok – no back wall to reach in a room, no audience chatter to overcome, no band volume to compete with, no need to rise above anything beyond their own accompanying instrument (if that). They might be in an arena filled with fans, but they are still addressing the mic as if it’s an iPhone.
Which is not to say you can’t be a great singer to an iPhone, or to a mic treated like an iPhone – “crooner” wasn’t always a positive term when it was introduced to describe intimate address through audio technology, either, though it applied to some of the best singers of the 20th century. But what the sound engineer’s observation made me think is the way a social situation is projected from the st…
