The dynamic range of a full size symphonic orchestra is very impressive, it's 105+ dB!
A Timpani up close you can feel in your belly as though someone punched you lightly in the gut and you can wear earplugs all you want it isn't going to help you if the horn you play concentrates that shock wave in the reverse manner in which it allows your own notes to go out, probably much worse if your chosen note happens to match the note to which that particular timpani is tuned. From the bell end to your mouthpiece it's essentially an open channel with a very specific length chosen to match the pitch at which the whole thing resonates. Get close to that frequency and anything you (and others, such as timpani players) do will be amplified. Your puny outgoing breath will have to fight with the force of a grown man hitting a ~1square meter sheet of very taut skin. It's a pretty uneven match.
Do Timpani players themselves play with ear protection? (Pretty common for drummers in pop music.)
Incidentally, if someone is willing to pick it up, I still have a silver plated Yamaha slide sitting here that hasn't been used for years (one of my lungs isn't what it used to be). Free to a good home.
> A Timpani up close you can feel in your belly as though someone punched you lightly in the gut
This is the #1 reason I bought those "ridiculous" subwoofers... A lot of the experience of the symphony lives in frequency ranges that are difficult to reproduce. Anything that does a hard cutoff at 20Hz is basically neutering the larger instruments. Feeling these transients is the entire point of having someone slam a mallet into a large object.
Interesting - but not super relevant - data point: a Symphony Orchestra at 1 meter distance at full volume produces < 20 Watts of power!
I think your average stereo is going to have a substantial problem with any kind of orchestral music, you won't be able to hear the soft passages and the louder ones will get you 911 attention assuming you could hear the softer ones. Fortunately most audio reproduction media can't do it either. But if you have access to the original masters (or digitized copies) you can get up to 80 dB range. Putting together a non-headphones based stereo system to reproduce that in a normal living room is going to be pricey.
And this is why Watt is a poor substitute for volume, because speaker sensitivity is more important. Every energy doubling (50W => 100W) is just +3dB, and you'll loose some of that due to power compression at the upper limits. A speaker with 76dB sensitivity compared to one with 107dB is quite a different experience when fed 10W. Reproducing ~110dB of acoustic power is not particularly difficult, except for the lowest frequencies which might either require high electrical power rating or impractically large horns. Some people build horns as beds to make them fit into their apartment: http://www.hifi-forum.de/viewthread-188-2426.html
> I think your average stereo is going to have a substantial problem with any kind of orchestral music.
Indeed. The impedance difference between a live instrument vs a general-purpose reproduction system is almost always going to be fantastical. Just think about how loud a person's voice can get.
20 watts of power into a live brass instrument is going to require something like 500-2000 watts worth of typical audio gear to approximate at reference volume without much distortion. There are specialty loudspeakers designed to more closely approximate certain elements - which can reduce these power requirements - but then you are forced to make all kinds of other weird tradeoffs.
Even C0 (for instance on a Bosendorfer Imperial) doesn't nearly go that low. You'd have to synthesize the sound, I don't think any normal arrangement would pick it up even if it was present in a performance (for instance, that organ mentioned elsewhere in the thread). 70 mm Dolby Stereo tracks from motion picture reels will go as low as 3Hz. I'm not sure if that makes it to Blue-ray though, would be nice to try for a lark but not enough of a win to shell out money for.
Low frequencies can occur in nature, waterfalls, earthquakes and the like. Here is a writeup, with photos, of a multiple rotary subwoofer installation for the Niagra Falls Fury show about the creation of Niagara falls.
20Hz is already pretty deep, and usually only found in home cinema subs! The deepest organ note goes down to 16Hz I think? PA subwoofers are usually tuned to 40Hz, because there is typically no energy in regular music below that cutoff. The stuff that "punches you in the chest" is actually not deep bass, but kick bass, which is above 60Hz.
No, they go down all the way to 8, that's a 64' pipe. There are only very few organs in the world that can do this and I'm not even sure if those stops are functional.
I have a 'virtual' version of that here and you simply can't hear it (you can feel it though).
I heard they have pipes that big at the Liverpool cathedral, but they only use them when the Queen was there, as they are literally wrecking the cathedral.
I totally get why they would want to limit the use of that particular register. At that frequency you're putting standing waves in the structure of the cathedral that are long enough to put significant stresses on the masonry. I've played around a bit with a 32' stop in a church and that already had me worried about the stained glass and the more delicate bits of stone work. Half that at volume must be very impressive.
I don't think it is written into a piece (at least not one that I know of) but if you play the 32' pedal C and C# together you get a ~2 Hz beat frequency that is amazing to hear but probably didn't help the church building that I worked at. :)
Hehe, that's nasty :) Yes, of course, you can get all the sums and differences by going up and down that stop and keeping the lowest note pressed all the time. You probably end up giving the wind machine a nice work out too.
I played Timpani for two years in high school. I never felt the need to wear ear protection. Although I did develop Tinnitus twenty years later, but I think it's more related to having to block out noise in open offices than me playing those drums a long time ago.
I tried getting back into drums a bit with just practicing paradiddles on practice pads with standard drum sticks not too long ago, post-Tinnitus, and I needed to wear ear protection for that, I could feel a pressure in my ears with each strike, and it seemed a little unsafe.
Timpani drum strikes are much softer, though (you have cotton and what feels like panty hose wrapped around that cotton on the end of the sticks) so I never really felt pressure in my ears, at least as far as I can remember, and even though I was trying to make it loud at times, it didn't seem significantly louder than when I was playing other instruments surrounded more closely by other musicians playing (like when I was playing saxophone sitting amongst the trombone and trumpet and tuba players).
It can be caused by wearing headphones and playing music loud enough and long enough, which I had to do extensively in order to do my work and focus, because if I didn't have them on there was often 4-6 conversations that I could hear from my desk at various times throughout the day (and not too uncommon there'd be 2-3 different conversations literally next to and across from my desk, it was apparently a hotspot for BAs and scrum masters to congregate and chat for 45+ minutes at a time. I tried to get my assigned desk changed but had little luck with that).
I think at one point I got noise cancelling headphones and that helped a bit more, but I still had to play music at a certain level to cover the sound. Don't quite remember anymore though since it's been four years since I was in that situation.
I'm sure not every open office is like that. In particular the one at my current job, the one time I went in, was significantly quieter. Although the office was only a third full as well, since things changed a lot since the pandemic started for how many people show up to the office (I work remote almost exclusively now).
To be clear, I don't know for certain it caused it, it just seems the most likely culprit out of the possible causes in my life.
> Do Timpani players themselves play with ear protection? (Pretty common for drummers in pop music.)
I would be surprised to see someone playing the Timpani wearing ear protection, if there aren't other even "louder" musicians around. If someone in proximity is playing the cymbals (or snare drum, or whip etc.) loudly though, I would absolutely use ear protection even when playing Timpani.
I'm a musician, and I wear the cheap ones. They actually work great. They're cheap enough that I can keep a pair in each instrument case. I do use them when listening to live music as well.
If your ears are shaped well for the cheap ones, there's no real reason to spend the extra $200. But the fitted ones are comfortable to wear all day (literally).
Indeed, I do well with Hearo's or ER20's, which are similar if not identical. Maybe they're a bit more visible than the fitted ones, but that's OK for the styles that I play -- mostly jazz and folk music.
Not just percussion, I know violon players who do (same brand), because violins are very close to their player's ear, and hearing is really important to violin players.
Snare or cymbals can be extremely loud up close but their spectrum is more like white noise, in comparison a Timpani is more like an 'audio laser' for want of a better term, relatively few harmonics and all of the energy concentrated in a very narrow band.
Even a string quartet can produce quite an impressive dynamic range if the music calls for it. The Takacs quartet recording of Beethoven's Grosse Fuge is a great example with the extreme contrast between the soft, slow section and the two loud fugues that sandwich it[1]. You can open it up in audacity and the visual difference between the sections are immediately obvious. You don't often get this kind of large dynamic ranges in other music.
> Do Timpani players themselves play with ear protection? (Pretty common for drummers in pop music.)
I don't. Most of the music I've played in an orchestral setting hasn't really been that loud; there are certain sections of a piece where you might play louder than usual, but most is fairly low in volume. Wearing earplugs would mute everything else, including details you might need to hear, feedback from the conductor etc during rehersals etc.
As an (amateur) percussionist/drummer I will typically only using custom earplugs if I play a really piercing instrument for extended periods, such as bells, chimes orchestral cymbals, or if I'm standing close to them.
A drum kit in an orchestral setting is usually not that loud, at least not from my experience. Drum kits in band settings on the other hand... In those settings I'll usually wear in-ears whenever possible, which gives me a mix of whatever I need to hear, as well as a little bit of my drums so that I can hear what happens onstage. If not possible, I'll wear custom plugs which reduces everything more or less evenly with ̃~25dB.
When I was young taking horn lessons my teacher told me that being too close to the timpani can increase your chance to miss notes. This paper is useful in showing some evidence for that. This problem is more unique to the horn as its bell points backwards (and to the horn player's right side). From the audience and conductor's perspective (the house) the horns are usually center or on the left side (stage right) of the stage and the timpani are on the right (stage left) so it isn't an issue. However sometimes you show up and you're pointing right at the timpani or bass drum. I played in one group for a while that did that and it was very frustrating working with them to change it (it never happened). They squeezed us in so tight that it just didn't work well for the horns. To be effective the horn really needs some space and good surfaces behind to reflect the sound into the hall.
Youth orchestra, second violin, next to the cannons for Tchaikovksy's 1812. As measure 328 approaches, disobey the conductor, put down the violin and cover ears.
If you toot one horn in to another it's also a surprisingly strong disruption.
I tried using it as an effect ones, but didn't really succeed to do anything useful (feeding sines through my trumpet while playing it with some Y adapter)
Technically, trumpets are not horns. Horns have conical bores. Brass instruments have a cylindrical bores and a flare at the end. The flare of a brass instrument is mostly for projection. The conical bore of a horn is primarily for timbre.
You're right that trumpets have cylindrical bores, but that's not a universal characteristic of brass instruments. For example, cornets and euphoniums have conical bores, yet they are brass instruments; their cylindrical-bore counterparts are trumpets and baritones, respectively.
Yeah I was a tubist. Timpanis were arms length away, I have to assume that the effect is only for French Horn players…that tiny mouthpiece and the continuous tapering and the intense flare at the end…it’s also aimed a funny direction compared to the other brass instruments (a little to the side rather than up or straight ahead).
There is a wonderful YouTube video of Beethoven's 9th 4th movement taken and recorded next to the Timpanist. From this position, the brass dominates the rest of the orchestra. Fun to watch. I always enjoy watching the Timpanist in live performance. Worth sitting in the royal circle (ie upstairs) just to get this perspective. Video: https://youtu.be/XjvNd4yC8gs
'Gunther Schuller (b. 1925), an influential horn player,
writes: “The timpani’s spreading wave-lengths back up
through the horn, violently jarring the player’s lips. Under
these conditions split notes abound and what notes can be
played develop a strong rasp. A half minute of this and the
horn player will retain no sensitivity in his lips” (1962).
...
This proximity effect with the timpani has also been highlighted as a potential source of injury to horn players
(Horvath, 2010), where “the impact of the timpani on the horn
is an extremely direct and painful one” (Schuller, 1962), “like
being hit in the mouth” (Buckle, 2008), and “will also negatively affect endurance” (Hill, 2001).'
A Timpani up close you can feel in your belly as though someone punched you lightly in the gut and you can wear earplugs all you want it isn't going to help you if the horn you play concentrates that shock wave in the reverse manner in which it allows your own notes to go out, probably much worse if your chosen note happens to match the note to which that particular timpani is tuned. From the bell end to your mouthpiece it's essentially an open channel with a very specific length chosen to match the pitch at which the whole thing resonates. Get close to that frequency and anything you (and others, such as timpani players) do will be amplified. Your puny outgoing breath will have to fight with the force of a grown man hitting a ~1square meter sheet of very taut skin. It's a pretty uneven match.
Do Timpani players themselves play with ear protection? (Pretty common for drummers in pop music.)
Incidentally, if someone is willing to pick it up, I still have a silver plated Yamaha slide sitting here that hasn't been used for years (one of my lungs isn't what it used to be). Free to a good home.