Political passion alert -- this one is a respite from politics.
For a few years this column has occasionally ventured off into the entertainment world. As much as any subject in the genre I've talked about -- and critiqued -- the NBC series "America's Got Talent." The AGT show is, in fact, the topic of two of the all-time most widely-read columns on this site, including this one that still gets read even thought it dates back a couple years.
Since I'm pretty sick of politics -- a Democrat convention will do that to you -- and since AGT is in the middle of its season, I thought I'd mention yet another thing that would make it (and similar shows) better.
Dear AGT,
Tell the audience to shut up, please.
I am not sure when it became fashionable to do this, but these days when it is a singer who is on stage competing in a network-televised talent show, whether the not-too-lamented "American Idol" or, in this case, AGT, the audience can be relied upon to applaud, scream and generally be obnoxious during the performance -- particularly when the singer attempts particularly high notes.
That has been a really unpleasant feature of this season's acts, some of which are indeed singers and vocal groups. It is "unpleasant" because, as you may guess if you don't watch the show, one watches it for the talent. Keep that thought.
When the "talent" is a singer, particularly an unaccompanied vocal group (but this applies to all singing acts), the audience at home is evaluating the talent, showmanship and vocal skills of the performers. We out in TV-land aren't just bystanders; we are expected to vote for the act we like the most, and our votes count toward the advancement of the performers to the subsequent round.
One group, for example, is "Linkin Bridge", a vocal act made up of four young men from an inner city singing a capella in the contemporary style, with beat-box vocals and well-executed harmony. They are very good, we suspect. When we can, in fact, hear them, their execution is really tight and the harmonies accurate and well-practiced.
With 25 years of championship-level harmony singing experience myself, I think I can judge that pretty well, even if the style is not the same.
Except we can hear them about half the time. The rest of the time, the theater audience is screaming and cheering and generally making it difficult to hear the voices and the harmonies and the tuning, which is what you have to judge with an act of that type.
Come to think of it, with any kind of singing, you can only judge it if you can hear it, hear the intonation, hear the styling, hear the vocal skill and nuance, hear the story-telling that is a part of a singer's reason for being there. That's as true of individual singing acts as it is of groups.
Now, if you want to applaud a magician, or a juggling act, or a comedian, or dancers, or a professional bowling-ball eater, you go right ahead. You're not making it difficult to assess their performance.
Since this appears to be a contemporary trend, I suppose we will not stop it. NBC is probably not going to tell its theater audiences to remain quiet until singers are finished, even though in the civilized world we do that.
But this is a TV show, with actual professional sound engineers working in the theater. Would it be asking too much of NBC to consider adjusting its broadcast sound level balances for singing acts, to diminish the transmission of the audience's response to the TV audience in favor of the enhancement of, you know, the sound of the actual competing performers?
I'd really like to hear what, say, Linkin Bridge actually sounds like on a whole song. Perhaps NBC might want to consider doing that.
Perhaps we'd have fewer over-trying 12-year-olds winning, if it did.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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