Why ignore the bandleader?
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- Опубликовано: 6 сен 2024
- Evan & Katelyn Heling and Emily Calandrelli discuss a question about music on the march.
LATERAL is a weekly podcast about interesting questions and even more interesting answers, hosted by Tom Scott. For business enquiries, contestant appearances or question submissions, visit www.lateralcas...
GUESTS:
Evan & Katelyn Heling: @EvanAndKatelyn, / evanandkatelyn
Emily Calandrelli: @SpaceGal, / thespacegal
HOST: Tom Scott.
QUESTION PRODUCER: David Bodycombe.
RECORDED AT: The Podcast Studios, Dublin.
EDITED BY: Julie Hassett.
GRAPHICS: Chris Hanel at Support Class. Assistant: Dillon Pentz.
MUSIC: Karl-Ola Kjellholm ('Private Detective'/'Agrumes', courtesy of epidemicsound.com).
FORMAT: Pad 26 Limited/Labyrinth Games Ltd.
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: David Bodycombe and Tom Scott.
© Pad 26 Limited (www.pad26.com) / Labyrinth Games Ltd. 2023.
I teach HS competitive marching band. This is especially complicated by the location of the marching percussion. If they are not directly behind you or within about 10 yards, you cannot listen to them, or else you will end up behind. Sometimes there will be multiple conductors who are adjusting their tempo to be just ahead of the main one to make up for this lag as well.
I wonder how difficult this becomes when you have a particularly massive band, like those that perform at the Tournament of Roses Parade on New Year's Day.
@@FrankiePeanuts I used to march in high school (even got to perform in the Tournament of Roses Parade), and it's pretty difficult. We had about 375 performers on the field during our marching shows, about 300 of which were musicians. To conduct for that, there were 5 conductors, with 3 on the front sideline and 2 on the back for instances in which we'd turn around during a performance. They were trained to be slightly ahead or behind of the center conductor at certain parts so that certain groups of people on the field could watch them and be in time. Every single person had a dedicated thing to listen for or watch for time, which changes depending on where you are on the field at any given time and who exactly is around you. When learning and rehearsing the show, we'd often spend a few minutes standing in place, going over which musicians watch which conductors and who listens to who for time, and playing while standing still in order to make sure it all lines up correctly at the press box where judges sit. Many a director has had many a headache trying to parse the issues of the speed of sound being so much slower than the speed of light, and how that makes everything in a marching band so complicated.
@5:29: I love the look on Tom's face the moment he realized he'd just given the answer
oh wow that really was the answer, wasn't it!?
I got this as soon as Tom hinted that it wasn't just a big band, it was a *big* band.
It wasn't a "big band", it was a band that was big. 😀
It's an Australian fiberglass version of a band.
"Castlemaine XXXX brings you... BANDO! The fast bowling giant orchestra! Queensland, you're for it!"
That got me thinking of Fleetwood Mac performing Tusk with the USC Marching Band
@@ArifRWinandarlol
As someone who played trumpet in marching band for both high school and college, I should have gotten this a lot sooner. (Got hung up on the "Big Band versus Big Band." What Tom should have said for clarity is "large ensemble band versus the Big Band genre".) What Tom Scott is talking about is the effect called Phasing. And there's more than just the delay caused by members being up to about 450 feet apart. (US Football regulation fields are 360 feet (110 m) long by 160 feet (49 m) wide.)
Sure, you get phasing from the sheer distance a stretched out marching band (including show bands, like in the movie Drumline, and competitive drill bands like those in DCI competitions) may have, but a bigger source of phasing can occur with playing inside a large stadium, both domed and open-air structures, as the sound will reflect off the structure and come back at the band. If you're not paying attention and relying on ear to make sure your Insync with the rest of the band, that reflected sound can get you playing along a second or two behind the band. So, for Tom to suggest that those closer to the audience play "with the beat" has a more dangerous problem in knowing if that beat is from the perc behind you or from the reflected sound.
Another technique we employed in marching band was to clip our notes slightly. As the sound travels the distance from the band to the audience in the stadium, the sound will stretch out a bit. It's also why when you hear a marching band chant their school's initials, it sounds weird if you're seated close to them. For instance, my school was Arizona State University, so instead of chanting "Aye, Ess, You", we would chant, "Hay, Hes, Hu", knowing full well it sounds like "A! S! U!" when it got to the audience's ear.
Not Big Band but a band that is big. Not as big as space though.
Remember, these are cryptic-lite questions. They are supposed to have double meanings
What I wonder: Phasing can make the rythm right only for one spot in the stadium: The one where all the sound waves arrive at the planned time. The out of synch effect must be doubled for the audience that is opposite the conductor. How do you deal with that?
“It’s not jazz. It’s a big band”. Everybody who knows anything about jazz was either totally confused or figured it out from this clue.
BTW, Big Band, as in Glenn Miller, is a genre of Jazz. It isn’t just a lot of players on stage. A symphonies band can have more musicians, but it’s not Big Band music.
Edit: I meant to say symphonic band but got autocorrected.
That's what was throwing me, big band being a form of jazz but then claiming it's not jazz. Which made me think big as in large, which got me stuck on orchestras.
Yeah, that one really bothered me - I've been playing in a Big Band for years, and it is absolutely jazz.
On various live video recordings of Queen playing Radio Ga Ga, you can see the ripple of hands clapping start at the stage and move to the back of the stadium. They are all clapping in time to how they hear the music, because all the speakers were around the stage, right at the front.
They do this technique with the speaker stacks at rock festivals, the stage speakers are live and the ones that are set 'in the crowd' are on a delay to enhance the sound for those further away from the stage. 🤔
I’m ecstatic with the amount of Evan and Katelyn content on RUclips recently!! 😅
With our local orchestra we would sometimes invite someone living at a local facility to conduct a song. We would listen to the percussion and our volunteer conductor would have the time of their life imitating the movements and gestures they just saw our regular conductor make. They loved it, the audience loved it, we loved it. It was great
I was in a school band that had a similar piece as a prank on an audience member. All we needed was a solid downbeat to get started, then we'd play on our own.
Yay! As a former member of a marching band, I got this one right away!
Oooh at last! A question I can get immediately! It's been a long time but I was in a high school marching band once upon a time :P
Just wondering, what part of the audience hears it nicely? I don't think I would want to be 'behind' the band in this case, I guess?
If the conductor/bandleader is broadly between the audience and the players it should be best, yes, though I'm guessing in a stadium the distance from the centre to the average audience member is much greater than even the distance between the furthest marching bandspeople, so it should be 'good enough' (not aiming for concert-hall quality here) from most seats.
Think of it like a wave of sound crashing across the field. It starts in the back, and as it reaches each section, they add their sound to it. You really get a feel for this if you are in the drumline because they are a big part of the tempo of the overall band.
It shouldnt actually matter. All the soundnis travelling at the same speed, doing this is lining up the spunds in space, once they are lined up, they dont get misaligned.
@@artemisspawnofzeus7732 But it only lines up if you're in front of the band. Suppose the back plays a beat before the front because that's how long it takes to get to the front for the sound fronts to line up. Then if you're behind the band, the notes from the back will reach you *two* beats ahead instead (and if you're on the sides, they'll be off by a beat where they wouldn't have been).
@@Stirdixtechnically yes, this only works well for one location. But you may not know that marching is often a judged performance and those judges are in the press box, usually in the middle of the home sides bleachers. So that's where we play to. Also it probably doesn't hurt that this means away fans at games have a slightly worse experience of the halftime show.
I’m surprised none of them have seen the clip of Queen performing at Live Aid where you almost “see” the speed of sound as the crowd responds to the beat of the music based on their distance from the stage
The more I learn about the details of music theory… the more incredible engineering and mess of parameters to take to account of with sound…
It’s honestly getting more and more impressive how everything *has* to work together to just play it live. Getting much more avenues to appreciate rather than just composition and the music, but also the organization and engineering behind it to play it in the first place. Knowing about the answer, I am probably stuck trying to “finger point” when I see big bands play to notice the quirk. 😂
Literally, my best friend in high school was a blind trumpet player in our marching band (and concert band, and jazz band), so I went there immediately. He never “followed the director”!
My mind immediately wanted to know if it was a "big band" or a large band. Haven't gotten to the answer yet, but having been in marching band, my guess is that they may have to play slightly out of time so that the sound reaches the audience at the same time.
I paused just after the question, and my theories were (a) that Jen was blind, (b) that Jen was leading so the band was actually taking timing from her, or that (c) Jen was on a video feed and the delay meant she couldn't follow the signals but had to just play ahead. So I like to think my gut feelings were close on this one!
Before watching.. maybe the Trumpets are at a different Location and they are using a delay, so the sound arrives at the Audience at the same Time? I know something like this with big Loudspeaker Arrangements..
Initial thoughts: is this simply like symphonic orchestra tuning/syncing? All the heads of section sync to the conductor, sub-section heads sync to their parent's section head, and members sync to their direct head; like a tree or chain of command. So in this question, Ben would be the trumpet section head. And Jen would be a trumpet member following Ben.
But for a parade/sport-type orchestral band, there would be a few additional challenges which don't apply to sit-down amphitheatre-style orchestra. For example, not everybody could have line-of-sight with the conductor. Even more interesting is managing time adjustment over longer distances, due to sound being so slow to move through space compared to light. Watch crowds at huge outdoor concerts jumping in a wave, and not at the same time, as the tick of the metronome visibly moves slowly through the air. So, if Jen, is far enough away from the conductor, its signals are out-of-sync and misleading.
Results: I had the explanation nailed down, if not for the direction of sync (Ben vs Jen being the farthest). Still, I don't understand why it's synchronized that way rather than the other way around. If anyone can explain this me simply, you're welcome.
I remember when I was studying music, in one of our lectures the lecturer was talking about the challenges of doing audio in large concerts where there's a lot of rows back from the stage - and actually needing to delay the sound coming out from speakers further back by an incredibly small amount so that it all synced up right and didn't sound weird!
2:55 Absolutely. Sometimes you just can't see the conductor xD
There is also a small, but not significant delay for the time it takes for an instrument to produce the sound. A 15foot instrument takes longer for the sound to travel, than a 1 foot instrument. Add to that that some instruments require the sound to be reflected before it gets to the front.
Congrats on 100k subs lateral YT!
Been there. 20k brass players on the field next to the elbe river in dresden.
Got this at "BIG band" and can imagine this is really difficult to get right. Also just discovered Evan & Katelyn recently and am delighted to see them on here!
I've been a lead snare in a marching band when i was a kid but we weren't big enough to do stadiums and all (although we did the ottawa roughriders stadium, once). This is very very interesting!
I did marching band for 10 years. We would actually have the centre snare control the tempo instead of the conductor. The rest of the drumline would follow them, and the conductor would actually watch their feet as they marched to get the tempo. The rest of the band would listen back to the drumline for the tempo, unless we're about 10-15 yards laterally away from the drumline (ehh, I said the name of the show!), then we would watch the conducgtor instead of for the tempo/
It’s a Big Band simulator videogame (WITH peripherals) for the Wii and Jen is 5.
You could run into issued if the band is so big, there is a noticeable delay for the speed of sound travel time.
The question quickly brought to mind Rowan Atkinson's performance during the 2012 London Olympics Opening Ceremony. 😅
Disappointed in myself for not getting this immediately as I work in music. Sometimes timpanists in orchestra do the same thing.
I played trumpet in marching bands for ten years. (four in high school, six in college). What Tom it is talking about is phasing, and I should have gotten it. But I was hung up on the "big band versus big band" bit. Had Tom said "Large Ensemble versus the Big Band genre", I probably would have gotten there sooner. The effect he's talking about is phasing.
This clicked for me near immediately b/c I was in marching band in high school XD
Specifically, I was in our pit orchestra playing things that are physically impossible to march with (marimba, xylophone, gong, chimes, that sort of thing). We *never* looked at the drum major, because we needed to be in sync with the rest of the band and just listened back to what everyone else was doing.
I saw Evan and Katelyn and my brain couldnt even comprehend it was in a Lateral episode!
But if you are behind the band? Now the delay is doubled...
Not really. The people at the front play a little bit delayed, and the people at the back follow the conductor
@@anthonywong7906 Yes, so they sound from the people at the front are twice delayed.
@@57thorns ohhh… I misread the comment. Makes sense now, thanks for the correction
Wow, given the slim description given here, this seems rather impressive. I'm a musician, never played in such a big band, but I fiddle around with delay effects a lot and find it very hard to play out of sync with what I hear, so respect to do that regularly with out people noticing. And even if the signal thing makes it so, that it's "not that hard" respect to whom ever came up with a method to make it easy. (But I don't think it is easy)
Came here from the podcast - didn’t expect that answer certainly!
Also yay Evan and Katelyn! Can they invite Tom Scott to resin time in exchange?
I would have never got this in a million years without reading the comments
Lateral is only thing I'm watching nowadays on RUclips, please keep it going I love it.
Half way through: I am wondering if latency has something to do with it. When I was in (paramilitary) summer cadet camp: the entire company would be slightly out of step due to the speed of sound.
This is why they're clever with researching their guests ahead of time, no marching band nerds in this group lol. As a percussionist in marching band in high school and college I knew right off haha. Love this series!
Brilliant!
I thought Jen was the musical equivalent of the sibling getting the non-connected controller, because your mother told you to let your younger sibling play with you on your gaming console. She could play whatever she wanted, because her trumpet didn't make any sounds anyways.
Just great, valid, guesses, one after the other in this episode.
I knew this because I played in the front ensemble for a couple of years and we couldn't look at the drum major
Well, I got this from just the title/thumbnail. New record for myself
(I was discussing this the other day so I got lucky)
I'm curious - what sort of signals does the bandleader give out so the players further away can see them? Are they just a conductor with a baton?
I was got halfway there quite quickly. I thought it was lag over the internet, rather than lag in real life.
Man I really thought I had this one immediately 😂 I went for they both play the same part in a jazz ensemble but Jen was playing a solo while Ben was part of the background cues, but then the clue of “not a Big Band but a big band” messed it all up for me haha
Something down the line made me think of Chris Hadfield singing from space with school kids and they would have had to have planned for the delay, so my brain kinda went in the correct direction, just waaaaaay too far away!🤣
I'm amazed that Emily knew 'First chair' but not that Big Band was a genre!
I thought this was going to be something about the particular piece of music being played. That it would be something aleatoric or like one of Steve Reich's phase pieces.
spent the entire time thinking about if "band leader" was synonymous with xonductor
To Tom's credit, the question writers were weasels with the wording on this one to distract from getting to marching band too soon. The more accurate term would be Drum Major, but A: literally nobody that didn't march would know that, and B: it'd give away the answer too quickly if they knew that or if they were told the definition early on
Where can you get those awesome pop filters with the smileys from the Helings?
my first thought was: does Jen's trumpet work?
"Knowing" Tom, I thought this was more of a general physics question than specifically a music question.
I Jen, an animal? Elephant? Edit: Could still be! A really, really big band!
👍
i cant seem to find this online anywhere. but why do full episodes not get uploaded to youtube?
Tom definitely did not get/state it completely right here.
His answer (far away follows signal, rest follows sound) only makes sense if the whole audience is behind the conductor (as in concert halls)
The football/field talk was misleading.
If it's a stadium with a band on the whole field it would make sense for the CENTER to play to signal an the rest to sync by ear.
This would ensure sync for the audience all around.
But the audience is placed 360 degrees around the band. Do they try to make it roughly equally roughly in sync for all of them, or as good as possible for the bandleader standing in front of the more expensive seats?
Marching band is usually more than just so football games get a halftime show. There's judged performances and divisions and such. All that to say, the judges are usually in the press box or around the middle of the home teams bleachers, so that's where we try to make it sound good.
If the away team's crowd notices and wants a better halftime experience, they should go to home games too and support their marching band.
But realistically, you actually need to be paying close attention to even notice the difference adjusting timing makes even in a stadium and most people in a crowd won't do that and may never even notice the performance is marginally worse on one side. There's a reason basically nobody talks about this.
What about the ones in the middle?
But if this is in like a stadium, surely only one part of the audience gets the synced audio, and the rest gets an overlapping desynced mess? if people in the front can hear everything in sync the people behind will be offset because the musicians far from them are waiting and that sound has to travel back to them, so they're desynced.
would work if the band is on only one side of the spectators, but even with a half circle that'd already fail.
Typically it's oriented from the perspective of the "Home" side, or in a competition, wherever the judges are (usually the home side)
And from experience the desync isn't actually *that* bad, just not usually as crisp. Half a beat delay only at a super high tempo, but most marching band pieces don't go super high because then you would have to get the band to march half-time
What do the bandists in the middle do?
I thought it would be about that thing where they got like a thousand musicians together in a stadium to play foo fighters or whatever it was.
My school had a small marching band and none of the trumpets followed the band leader...
My first guess was this was a middle school band and Jen was there just for course credit so she just played whatever. No one cared because everyone except Ben was also there for course credit. And Ben was fine with it because he had no friends except the band.
As someone who played American football in high school, I should have gotten this based on the music being played out of the speakers.
Does anyone know what the technique is called, I'm not sure what to search to find out more?
As someone who has 40 years experience as a musician, more than 10 of which have been as a marching band instructor, I get what you mean (and agree) but take issue with the way you say it.
It's not that Ben is following exactly and Jen doing her own thing. It's about balancing anticipation and delay. Sound travels more slowly than light so either the distant players need to anticipate (play ahead of) the visual beat or the closer players need to delay their playing (play behind the visual beat).
I think it's misleading to talk about 'looks for the signals' and 'feels the beat.' In reality both will watch the beat but they will play at different times relative to what they see. I know from experience that any marching band trumpet who just plays on feeling the beat will not play in the right time - because all players move around the field during a performance and what they hear and feel will change as a result of this. Relying on the beat you hear as a player in a marching band is a recipe for disaster - no matter where you are on the field.
at first, i'm thinking mr. bean playing at the olympic opening tbh
First time I ever got the answer before the contestants lol.
One of my first ideas was that Jen was an animal and therefor playing their own tune at their own time.
*Spoilers!*
Well damn, this makes stuff like DCI even more impressive!
My initial answer was almost matches the true answer : One of them are playing behind the written measure, however my brain went to “Canon” somehow, because I suspect that Tom’s big band is a misdirection so my brain went too far to the other genre direction lol
I was briefly under the horrendous impression that Jen was playing remotely via Zoom due to worldplague. The lag... dear crud the lag...
Spider on a motorcycle? 🤔 What's that about?
The speed of sound is so weird? If you've ever been in a big crowd of people clapping in time to a song and you're sitting at the back, all the claps will sound together, but if you're at the front of the audience or on stage you hear people further back clapping fully out of time! This is one reason band members wear ear plugs!
Lol, when you said it's big band not jazz my brain twitched a bit, because bigband is jazz... Then you said "it's not bigband it's big band
My answer was that Jen IS the band leader.
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
the question should have said a 'big marching band' to remove ambiguity with the 'big band' genre
I think he was trying to deliberately maintain that ambiguity.
Ambiguity is how this podcast works!
Ambiguity helps with the *lateral* thinking aspect of this podcast ;)
At timestamp 0:01 insert sounds of increasingly frustrated marching band geeks screaming at their screens over the next 3 minutes.
So if you're in the audience on the opposite side of the field as the conductor, then $#&! you I guess
...and the fans in the opposite grandstand behind the band hear an absolute mash of incoherent noise...