Effects on the lips of horn players seated too close to the timpani (2014)
newt.phys.unsw.edu.au
newt.phys.unsw.edu.au
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.
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.
https://www.etymotic.com/product/custom-musicians-earplugs-w...
If you see much live music, it's worth picking up a pair too. If you rarely go, a pair of universal-fit plugs costs a tenth as much.
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.
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.
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.
I have a 'virtual' version of that here and you simply can't hear it (you can feel it though).
See:
https://www.mixtuur.com/en/whats-the-longest-organ-pipe-in-t...
https://www.liverpoolcathedral.org.uk/media/qyyd3x40/liverpo...
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.
Something like the Octobasse is amazing in person, and would be completely missing on a regular home speaker setup.
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).
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.
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.
Creds; performing diploma in Percussion from Guildhall.
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)
'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).'