Back, with Feedback
In a possibly vain attempt to reconcile the number of hours in each week with the number of tasks that I need and want to accomplish, I’ve set up a time management regime that has left my Outlook window resembling the rungs of a DNA ladder. This week, I even had a couple of rungs labelled “blog”, along with those labelled “exercise”, “Henry“, “practice”, “housework”, etc, not to mention those great white slabs labelled “CNT Reading” (and yes, I have noticed that the subject code for the Law of Contracts lends itself to a very apt diminutive). Unfortunately, I was unable to resist the rising tide of anxiety that swept through the body of second-year law students in advance of tonight’s CNT mid-semester exam, so my “blog” rungs were supplanted by “CNT revision” rungs, for what it was worth. If I’d known the problem was going to be so annoying, I might have spent my time more wisely. I expect the problems to be a bit hairy, but I hate having to plough through internal contradictions in order to deal with redundant issues that a court would never bother dealing with. Unfortunately, in a law exam, you don’t have the luxury that the judges have, of being able to say “It is not necessary for me to consider X”. It’s necessary, instead to say “There’s not a binding agreement here. But if there is, here are the terms of the agreement”. I know, I know, it has to be done. But it doesn’t mean I can’t be justified in getting the shits.
Let’s take as read the apologies for not having blogged for a long time. I’d be lying if I said I felt guilty about it, anyway. It’s not as if I’ve been sitting idle while my thousands of readers pine after my witticisms and insights. My blogging hiatus has left me with time to stew adequately on a couple of big thoughtful posts, which I’ll get around to publishing in due course (DNA rungs permitting). In the meantime, there’s something I’ve been meaning to get off my chest:
Feedback. Sound goes into a microphone and gets turned into a signal which gets amplified and fed into a speaker which converts the signal back into sound which gets picked up by the microphone. So the sound gets louder and louder, generally reaching the threshold of pain moments before members of the band and audience can stick their respective fingers in their respective ears. You’ll notice experienced musicians (who, understandably, tend to value their hearing quite highly) going the plug pre-emptively as soon as they hear any noise which could be mistaken for the beginning of a feedback loop. (The tortured shriek of tram wheels on tracks, I’ve found, can be particularly disconcerting in this regard). I’m pretty sure that my audiogram would have a noticeable notch at about 5kHz by courtesy of a singularly incompetent sound engineer I worked with once, who, during what passed for a sound check, left the faders on his beer-soaked mixing desk turned up full while he went behind the stage to plug and unplug various of his ex-auction microphone cables to see which three were working that night. He smilingly emerged about ten seconds after the screech started, making his way slowly back to the desk as the band and half a dozen early audience members began to bleed from the eyeballs.
Feedback, when it happens, is annoying in its own right, moreso when it’s your own fault. But I’ve got another feedback-related annoyance. It’s Chinese-water-torture annoying, rather than bamboo-up-the-fingernails annoying, but annoying nonetheless. It’s this:
There are lots of clichés in film and television. You know when a car chase starts, especially when it’s in an “exotic” location, that at some point a fruit cart is going to be upset and fruit is going to spill all over the road. You know that when a bomb is being defused, there will always be two or three seconds left on the clock when it stops. And you know that whenever someone who is a nervous speaker stands in front of a microphone, their first words will be accompanied by the beginning of a feedback screech.
But here’s the thing: There is nothing about speaking nervously which makes a PA system feed back. Unless something about your nervousness changes the tone of your speaking voice in such a way as to accentuate frequencies which happen to be the resonant frequencies of the room that you’re speaking in, nervous speech should be amplified just as adequately as confident speech. The only way that a screech might occur in those circumstances is if the nervous speaker speaks more quietly, or at a greater distance from the microphone, and there is an diligent sound engineer in attendance who cranks the gain up in order to make the speech more audible, and in doing so makes the microphone sensitive enough to pick up the sound coming out of the speaker. But it wouldn’t happen the second that the speaker starts. That instantaneous feedback is a dramatic device, intended to make sure that we, the audience, know (if we didn’t already) that the person speaking is nervous. When you know that it’s coming, though (like the dripping tap), it can be really, really annoying. That’s all I’m saying.