How does a singer benefit when performing from singing with their “ear piece”? How does that work?
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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.
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