The objective of this study was to obtain measurements of the self-to-other ratio (SOR) in the opera chorus on stage. Four members of the opera chorus of Opera Australia volunteered to carry wireless binaural microphones during a dress rehearsal of Verdi's The Masked Ball, in the Sydney Opera House. Conditions were those of actual performance in costume, with soloists and orchestra. Hence, the recordings are very realistic, if acoustically not so stringently controlled. The SOR was estimated from the recordings using M/S matrixing, complemented with L-R correlation by adaptive filtering. The results indicate how much louder the singers heard themselves relative to the rest of the ensemble, including the orchestra. The SOR varied with score and on-stage formation, but was 4-8 dB higher than in ordinary choirs (not opera), as might be expected from the podium acoustics. While each opera chorus artist can hear his or her own voice very well, they often hear less of the rest of the chorus and very little of the orchestra. This was borne out in informal listening; the orchestra often became inaudible once the choir entered its louder passages. [Work supported by the Australian Research Council under the SPIRT program.]

EXPLOR_STEP=$WICRI_ROOT/Wicri/Musique/explor/OperaV1/Data/PascalFrancis/Curation

HfdSelect -h $EXPLOR_STEP/biblio.hfd -nk 000172 | SxmlIndent | more

HfdSelect -h $EXPLOR_AREA/Data/PascalFrancis/Curation/biblio.hfd -nk 000172 | SxmlIndent | more

{{Explor lien
   |wiki=    Wicri/Musique
   |area=    OperaV1
   |flux=    PascalFrancis
   |étape=   Curation
   |type=    RBID
   |clé=     Pascal:04-0182923
   |texte=   Measurements of the self-to-other ratio in an opera chorus in performance
}}