How does a singer benefit when performing from singing with their “ear piece”? How does that work?
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A speaker setup at a venue is designed to provide an ideal audio experience for the audience, not the performer. From the stage, they might not be able to hear the entirety of the performance, or have a weird mix where they can barely hear some parts over the drums or whatever. An earpiece or a monitor (basically a set of speakers aimed at the performers) are used so that the performer can hear what they’re playing.
The ear piece allows you to hear the music “whole” if you are in a band you often only hear your corner eg flutes and not the whole band.
If you are using amped instruments and the sound is going out of speakers facing away from you, you may not hear the music well or may have to wait for it to bounce back of the back wall.
With the ear piece it allows the music the play through, in time (no echo delay) and the whole band to allow them to keep in time and tune. Dancers also use them for this reason
The earpiece that a singer has is called a “monitor,” specifically an “in ear monitor.” When you are at a concert the speakers and amplifiers are all facing outwards towards the audience. This makes it difficult for the performers on stage in a large venue to hear themselves.
This is because sound travels a bit over 1,100 feet per second. So imagine that an artist is playing at a standard indoor arena. A hockey rink is 200 feet long, and the back wall could easily be 75 or 100 feet further back. So if you are on stage the sound from that speaker has to travel close to 300 feet, bounce off the wall, and travel around 300 feet back. That is a full half second, meaning that the artist is hearing things a full half second late, which is an eternity in music. The monitors let them hear everything in real time.
In addition you can add things to the in ear monitors to help the artists. For example [this](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/MwkVvm-IPko) is a video of the band Polyphia playing a show a while ago when the drummer’s monitors go out. Polyphia plays very rhythmically complicated music, so to keep things tight they play to a click, meaning that each musician has a metronome in their monitors to help them keep tempo. So for the rest of the set the drum tech, who had working monitors, tapped out the tempo for the drummer to keep him on that click track.
Modern in ear monitors frequently contain protection for your ears as well. Concerts are very loud and repeated exposure to noises that loud can cause serious hearing problems, which is obviously a major problem for a musician. So these monitors also function as an ear plug to make sure that the artist is not damaging their ears.
You’ll notice pro musicians use these too. It’s so they can actually hear what being played.
Thank you! All together this made it understandable. I’m no where near musically inclined so I’ve always wondered.
It’s called a monitor. For smaller bands, the monitor is usually a speaker on the stsge floor in front of each musician.
Monitor speakers and earpieces give the musician/singer whatever audio cues that they need to comfortably perform.
Things can get loud and muddy on stage. Instrumentalists tend to want their own instrument to be prominent. Likewise, it is easier for singers to control vocal tone if they can hear the result from an external source.
Here’s an example of Michael Jackson signalling to the crew that he needs more volume in his ear piece. From :33, when he sings “…lurking in the dark”.
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