Series starts here.
Music focus – musical instruments and voices
Challenging. Think of when you only have a very small amount of “information” to send down the line. Or like a spacecraft going to beyond our galaxy further into space, it could communicate back to earth, but only tiny portion of maybe 10 lines of text, at any one time. And yes, in the case of online meeting software, you will have some delay, though not in light years as with space travel! But the delay is enough to annoy anyone. There is hope, please read on!
The following is about using Zoom.
Zoom audio setting
Zoom, like many conferencing applications, are designed for voices, for that matter, speaking voices. What’s more, voices individually. It does not cope well with simultaneous bidirectional flow – you can’t hear another person speak at the same time you speak. But that’s a secondary point. We want to focus on using Zoom for music.
Zoom is used for online music lessons. So how to make it work for music?
There are two settings you need to apply as the host. You can find information about this online. In short, you need to turn off Zoom adjusting volume on the host, and you need to use Original Sound. Please search online on further information on how to do this, and further explanation on what these settings do that help with music.
Find out what ways of playing music works
One instrument playing a clear tone that has an on-set percussive quality seems to work well, e.g. piano. Playing multiple instruments could easily push Zoom over the edge. With my limited testing so far, if you have a mix of different types of instruments playing together, the result on the other computers receiving the music is not that good, or not good at all. While the human ear understands and can appreciate the music, Zoom does not have the musical algorithm to code it electronically such that at the receiving end, you probably lose the sound of some instruments, and the quality / tone of those you can hear is worse than hearing it in person.
Think further about this, Zoom applies balancing between the sound sources on the input mic. As one instrument dips down in volume and another dips up, Zoom also adjusts to deal with this, but not always fruitfully.
For example, with an instrument playing the melody, being louder, Zoom heightens this instrument’s presence. At the end of a melodic line, this instrument drops its volume, Zoom deals with that by picking out another prominent sound, which could be the drum, another harmonic instrument etc. As the melodic instrument picks up again on the next melodic line, Zoom will adjust the sound levels again, but before it gets the melodic instrument to the prominent level, you won’t immediately hear this instrument prominently.
This is not the usual way we “hear” music. Your ear can recognise a melodic instrument, and when it dips between lines, you know what that means but you don’t necessarily “tune up” to listen to the accompaniment.
It’s difficult to suggest what best to do. Having lots of instruments playing together is probably to be avoided.
The limited experience I have of using piano, electronic organ, guitar, and singing, could work. And yes, Zoom has this ‘waning in and out’ as described above.
How about processing the sound first before zoom picks up the sound?
Here it gets better prospects. The simplest is like plug a mic into your computer, and get Zoom to ‘listen’ to this, rather than the on-board mic on the host computer. Depending on what setting you have on the computer, this option might be difficult. For example, on one of my laptops, I have a single input for headphone and mic, and I haven’t found an easy way to work with line in.
Audio tips
use “line in” or mic
If you have a audio mixing device, use mic or line to take input from the instruments, and put the output of the mixing device to input to your computer. Ensure the computer takes this ‘line in’ input only.
Zoom will receive this output as a balanced sound and it will not rebalance it; well it can’t, because it is not individual voices, it is a “sound”. Human will be able to unpick the individual ones because we grew up with that ability. It’s far more difficult to train a computer program to do that.
I hear you ask, what’s the difference between this and playing an audio or video file?
For Zoom, there is no difference. So, looking at this the other way, by stopping Zoom having to process multiple sources of sound coming into one mic, instead, supply it a combined sound of such multiple instruments, you can do music!
Well, it’s still not as reproducible quality. It’s not 100% “the same” 100% of the time. In some respects, the music we have in our worship is also not 100% “perfect” 100% of the time. Here, we have a different kind of allowance to make. Grace and mercy apply!
