Earplugs

I have had a few confused enquiries in recent months about what I wear in my ears when I perform. The answer: earplugs. This probably seems a bit absurd - why would I want to block out the sound I'm creating? Well, there are many reasons. It originally started when I developed mild tinnitus after practising for several years on a piano which was too large for my practice room. Of course, this was a rather disturbing experience, and I rushed off to an audiologist who found minor hearing loss in one of my ears and recommended I wear custom-made earplugs whenever I practise. So I bought some Etymotic musicians earplugs which reduce the sound by about 15Db (which means you still hear everything, just a bit quieter), and was rather surprised to discover that practising with them lent three significant advantages. Firstly, the sound coming back at you is much less overwhelming. This is important because a grand piano can create an enormous amount of noise in a small room and, much in the way that someone shouting in your ear causes you to recoil, this can create a lot of tension in your body. I wasn't even aware of this until I started using earplugs, when I discovered that my body was quickly relaxing due to the reduced volume. Secondly, you play as if you are in a much bigger room - it is a very common difficulty with students to convince them to play loudly enough to project in a big hall because it feels very unnatural. Something written mp may well have to be played mf or even f to convey the effect. Earplugs instantly transport you into a larger aural space, so to speak.The third advantage was maybe more personal - I found that I became more detached from the music that I was working on. This might sound like a disadvantage, but for me it is easy to be seduced by the sensual nature of sound, to get carried away by the music and waste time simply playing through pieces rather than focussing clearly on what work needs to be done. So my practice became much more efficient as a direct result of wearing earplugs.

I told my good friend Alban Gerhardt about this who, being the open-minded soul that he is, immediately tried out some earplugs and loved the experience. Very soon he was telling me he was enjoying using them for concerts too. I had done this once before and found the experience very disconcerting, but on his recommendation I tried again. At first I felt very insecure because wearing earplugs meant I got no feedback from the acoustic - was I too loud or too quiet? But after a couple of concerts I realised that it was actually just as easy to judge how loud to play with or without earplugs from simply observing the size of the hall and trying the piano for a few seconds au naturel (do not misunderstand what I mean here). It is possible to misjudge this, of course, but then it's possible without earplugs as well.

So what are the advantages of performing with earplugs? Essentially, it is a question of focus - I find with earplugs I am less distracted by audience noise and problems with the piano. The first never bothered me much anyway, but the second can be very irritating - when certain notes are a bit louder or softer than the others, it can really disturb one's concentration. Some pianists would probably say that this is a terrible reason to wear earplugs, like burying your head in the sand, but my belief is that these piano quirks seem much more significant to the performer than the audience, and that by wearing earplugs I actually hear much more realistically what the audience hears. But this is incidental: the real point is that performing for me is about achieving a state of unselfconsciousness in which I can react very spontaneously to the emotion of the music. For this, earplugs are very helpful.

As it happens, musicians wearing earplugs is becoming something of an issue for european orchestras. The EU is investigating how much noise orchestral musicians are subjected to with the possibility that earplugs will be compulsory in some settings. I think this would be a great shame - the experience of playing wind instruments, for example, can be fundamentally altered by earplugs (even the intonation can sound different), so coercion seems an unfortunate way of solving the problem. Nevertheless, one can easily damage one's hearing without realising, and it certainly must be a good thing for orchestral musicians to understand exactly what is going into their ears. Jeannie told me that one time when she was sitting directly in front of a trumpeter, it felt like someone was slapping her in the back of the head.

One thing I feel rather strongly about is that music colleges should give out earplugs as a matter of course. I suspect some students would find their work improves if they use them because many practise rooms in British music colleges, and probably elsewhere, are too small for the purpose; you simply can't hear properly what's going on when you play loudly.

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Comments

Steven, I heard you discussing earplugs on BBC Radio 3 In Tune. This has been a revelation to me. I'm off to buy some! I too suffer from tinnitus, after half a lifetime of playing both classical and rock music. I was in the front row at the National Opera Studio a few weeks ago. The volume of sound a trained opera singer can produce is definitely bordering on the ear damaging. Many thanks.

Posted by Chris Newport on 28 April 2009