The Bowl’s Sentinel of Sound

The time is 9:30. The parking, incredibly, is free and up-close convenient. Admission is free, too, and you can pick your perch: box, bench or cloud. On stage, the Philharmonic ends its sonic stretching. In all of the rows and all of the aisles there are no whispers, no coughs, no dueling bottles of wine. A distant gardener cleaning out hedges is a working tribute to silence. There are only the full-ahead sounds of the orchestra.

This . . . would you believe? . . . is the Hollywood Bowl.

But this is the Bowl on a rehearsal morning, arguably the place and the time for the best free outdoor concert in the free world.

Come back 12 hours later and everything changes. But if all goes according to rehearsal plans, the music shouldn’t change. Please.

Between an a.m. rehearsal and a p.m. performance, more than just the assembled masses impact on our fresh-air cultural pursuits. The temperature drops and the flutes may seem to flutter. The soloist misses the mark and the sound mixer kicks in. The winds pick up and the drums seem to roar. The barometer falls. A high-mounted speaker becomes eccentric.

And Elizabeth Cohen gets moving.

Cohen, for four seasons the Bowl’s consulting acoustician, like sound itself is in constant movement, working this roofless house, her ear to the ground, the stage and the heavens.

Cohen puts in more walking mileage than most ushers, listens to more strange sounds than marriage counselors.

In the morning, she climbs to the outer limits of the Bowl’s shell, inspecting the speakers there after a weekend of fireworks, looking for the fallout from rockets over Cahuenga Pass. In the evening, she’s at the top row of the 17,000-seat amphitheater, checking if any sound is leaking from the new high-rise escalators there, making sure the landscape and architectural barriers are working. Mostly she moves about, listening to the orchestra, talking into the walkie-talkie that forever links her with the mixing booth and the equipment room.

Every performance at the Bowl calls for a different game plan. This week it’s Beethoven most nights, Saturday it’s Peabo Bryson and “The King and I.” Next week Tchaikovsky, Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee. Thus, the morning rehearsals and the constant consultations, working out sound refinements with soloists, conductors, experts of various stripes and rank.

This season, Cohen has a few new things to be concerned about, to monitor. There is, for example, now a Hollywood Bowl weather station and a set of new, suspended microphones and some new front-of-the-house speakers.

In an age of rising acoustic literacy--compact discs and Walkmen and Dolbys and sound systems that surround--acoustician Cohen keeps looking for her perfect sound wave. Her endless summer.

That new weather station may help, allowing the sound technicians to quickly adjust to usually unpredictable and intangible changes in temperature and wind and barometric pressure, unseen factors that affect the conveyance of sound in an outdoor space.

The new speakers along the apron of the Bowl’s stage may help, delivering the sounds of soloists to the box sections, especially where soloists have been known to fade under the assault of a full orchestra.

The new suspended-from-the-shell Neumann microphones may help, making standing or fixed-stage microphones unnecessary.

Cohen calls the Bowl “one of the best places to listen to music outdoors in an urban environment,” but it has its challenges. There is always the problem of “environmental noises,” more unscientifically referred to as freeway traffic, passing airplanes and Highland Avenue voices. There is the fixed architecture of the Bowl, itself a landmark and not to be tampered with. There is the wide-open space of the place, a 500-foot chasm in which in true democratic spirit everyone should hear equally.

“The place is a living lab for sound,” Cohen says. “Music is about transformation, about emotions and about pleasures. What we try to do is tastefully transmit the emotional and musical content of a performance. The system can faithfully reproduce what the musician plays. The audience doesn’t always get direct sound since we have to work with microphones and speakers. But we try to convey a natural sound, what the conductor wants them to hear.”

On her wish list is a computer that would help to develop maximum sound levels and balances, one that would control the 456 channels that connect the orchestra, the mixing booth and the speaker system. She hopes to develop an Automated Adaptive Equalization curve, a standard for optimal sounds that would make instant adjustments to the sound system, no matter what happens atmospherically or electronically during a concert.

Cohen, a Stanford and Bennington graduate, is one of a small group of acousticians involved in entertainment and arts. She is part of the team that is working with architect Frank Gehry on the acoustics of the future Disney Concert Hall. She has worked as a consultant with the rock group Grateful Dead as well as tenor Placido Domingo in an outdoor concert in Mexico. More recently, she has consulted with film studio executives in the evaluation of new equipment and the design of theaters.

“Sound,” she says, “is half the motion picture experience. If you don’t use sound properly you lose half the power of film’s storytelling abilities. Turn off the sound and find out how watching a movie can be such a different experience. Music helps create mood and perceptions. Sound has power.”

Television is an audio wasteland, she says. But there are technological changes in signal transmission coming that may open the ears of TV viewers.

Her work with film and television people has produced some side benefits at the Hollywood Bowl, equipment loaned and tested from such firms as Dolby Labs, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, Todd AO.

Those hanging microphones, for example. They were purchased through a $12,000 gift from a Bowl support group, the Patroness Committee, but were designed by sound mixers Shawn Murphy (“Batman”) and Joseph McGee.

In a sense they are symbolic of that ability of music to move people that Cohen talks about, to develop harmonies and responses.

No question about the power of music to affect people.

In another musical pasture, away from the Bowl, disharmonies of all sorts have sprung up over what has been perceived by some as suggestive or criminal or occult lyrics in certain pop songs. Lots of folks, lacking their own weather station, are sticking their fingers in the air, sensing wind drifts, issuing storm warnings.