I suspect it’s something to do with sounds waves so have flaired as physics, but not sure?
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When 100 people sing together, they really do produce 100 times as much sound. But our ears do an interesting thing — they make big differences in sound seem like smaller differences in loudness. When there is more sound, you can hear that it’s louder, but twice as much sound seems less than twice as loud. A choir of 100 singers *feels* only 5 or 10 times as loud as one singer.
Why do your ears do this? Because it’s incredibly useful that we can hear really, really soft sounds and we can also hear really, really loud sounds. Did you know that the difference between the loudest amount of sound you can hear and the softest amount of sound you can hear is like the difference between the weight of the Empire State Building and the weight of a fly’s wing? That’s pretty amazing, right? Your ears squeeze down that difference so you can handle it. There is no scale in the world that could weigh a fly’s wing and also weigh the Empire State Building. But your ears can.
they are
you are mistaken
same reason you can hear a crowd cheer miles away from a stadium
again, your premise is *false*
1. The singers are not synchronized in terms of pitch and arrangement; some people sing faster, some slower, some sing it smaller like “we are the peoplee” and some sing it longer like “we are the peeeeeopleeeee”
2. Each 100 person choir is not pitch perfect; When you sing, you hit notes, although you will never hit them 100% perfect, it’s either almost perfect or not at all perfect. Now, in a choir, when 100 people sing, their pitches are not always perfect so they do not collide with each other and this make it sound more “detuned” a.k.a more widespread on the hearing stereo field.
3. Their volume is not equal; Some people sing louder and some people sing less louder.
4. Their vocal characteristics difference; Not everyone have the same voice, it’s different voices giving out the same sound, which again doesn’t clash with each other and sound more defined in the stereo field.
During recording choir, if it’s a team then the team will do chorus and record it. However, a single person can also do a choir by recording him/herself different takes of the same lyric and arranging them so they don’t hit at the same time (hit a few milliseconds later) and panning them on the stereo field.
I hope you can understand this well now, AMA if you have doubts.
There are a lot of correct and wrong answers here. There is another factor that hasn’t been discussed. Sound waves propagate in 3 dimensions. Energy from the sound waves will decrease according to the inverse square law.
This image visually describes the concept
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law#/media/File:Inverse_square_law.svg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law#/media/File:Inverse_square_law.svg)
If the sum of all the voices came from a single speaker and you were standing next to the person, it would rupture your eardrums.
The voices are spread out over space taken up by 100 people and a theater is a wide open space. No matter where you are located, even if you are among the singers, the pressures of the sound waves that hit your ear are exponentially lower than the sum of the sources of the sound.
Quick take: they are trying to hit the same frequency or multiples thereof. A greater number of disparate frequencies and non-multiple frequencies is perceived as louder because there is more noise filling the range of percievable frequencies.
Why are 100 people not 100 times taller than one person?
Also there’s a thing in choir singing about “if you hear yourself singing, you’re being too loud”
If you’re singing at the top of your lungs you’re now louder than everyone normal singing
Linearly it is, but our hearing is logarithmic so it would not sound 100 times louder. For that to happen there would need to be 1000 person choir.
Lots of people are coming at thus from a physics perspective, but I’ll come at it from a singing perspective. Soloists generally sing louder, while the individual members of a choir generally sing quieter. Soloists also get amplified more.
This is because it sounds better musically.
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