Walking into an anechoic chamber is one of the most disorienting experiences anyone attuned to sound can have. The lack of reflections confuses the brain, its usual aural cues stifled by the deadened environment. Sometimes you don’t realize just how distorted your perception has become until you exit the chamber, relieved to feel the ambient world around you once again.
Walking into a silent concert can be equally disconcerting. There’s still abundant ambience around you, but you sense instantly that something’s amiss. The band or DJ is on stage, the crowd is gyrating and hooting, the floor is thumping with the resonance of a thousand hoofs. But you hear no music. This must be what it’s like to be in a room full of comedians and not get the joke. But silent music shows — also sometimes referred to as silent disco or headphone concerts — are showing that they have a place in live music. And the best part? Even if they’re silent, they still require an FOH mixer.
Looking For Markets
The concept goes back a ways. At the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in 1999, the Flaming Lips used a low-power FM transmitter at the venue and handed out mini radio receivers and headphones to audience members. However, the event had training wheels: a conventional PA system was also used, so the sound could also be felt. The next year, the BBC’s Live Music experimented with a “silent gig” at Chapter Arts Centre Cardiff, where the audience listened to a band, Rocketgoldstar, and various DJs through wireless headphones. Five years later, the more mainstream Glastonbury Festival held a large-scale wireless headset event, in part to get around the U.K. stringent noise curfews.
Also in 2005, Ryan Dowd, owner of Memphis-based Silent Events (silentevents.com), who had previously deployed wireless headphones for VIP guests on a tour featuring Widespread Panic, extended the concept to the audience at large for the “silent disco” at that year’s Bonnaroo festival. He’s supported the silent disco at Bonnaroo every year since, and in recent years Dowd’s company has also provided silent concerts with bodypacks and headphones for attendees at the Vans Warped Tours and for fans of prog-rock jam band Umphrey’s McGee.
For the Umphrey’s McGee tour, the setup included a Sennheiser bodypack receiver and a pair of Audio-Technica headphones; the gear is provided to audience members who sign up for the feature ahead of time. Those lucky (and/or affluent) few get to hear the live-sound mix directly off the console.
But beyond acting as a novelty sideshow at music festivals, can silent concerts make a market for themselves? Yes, says Dowd, who built a business on the concept after seeing the positive reaction of music fans. Although he’s used the Sennheiser/A-T combination at Bonnaroo as well as for the Umphrey’s McGee shows, he has also developed his own wireless bodypack receiver that can be used with any kind of headphone or earbud to keep costs in check.
Expensive, but Worth It
The economics of the concept can be daunting. Dowd says the decision whether to sell or rent the rigs depends on each individual gig’s and client’s circumstances. Also, those registering for the Umphrey’s McGee tour headphones are notified on the website that a credit card authorization of $500 will be held up to 72 hours in advance (but will only be charged if you walk off with a belt pack and/or headphones or either are returned damaged, or “submerged in a 32-oz. beer”). Users are further advised that the audio signal is only guaranteed to work within 200 feet of the FOH area, and that, in the event of rain during any of the sets, it’s the users’ responsibility to keep the gear dry.
However, says Dowd, participants are willing to put up with the fine print to experience the benefits that the headphones can deliver. “It’s an incredibly intimate experience,” he enthuses. “You hear what the band is hearing. You can hear them talk to others onstage. And any seat in the house is the best seat in the house. You’re hearing it as the front-of-house mixer hears it. You never miss a note.”
Aside from the obvious novelty aspect, silent shows offer clients a way to help avoid what are becoming increasingly steep fines for violations of noise ordinances. The New York City Council recently increased the maximum fines for noise-code offenses and set new mandatory minimum penalties as well, with the maximum fine for making unnecessary noise increased from $250 to $500 per violation. Even casual viewing of Campus PD on the G4 network suggests that fraternity houses in college towns could save millions of dollars a year on fines and lost goodwill. (Silent Events’ Dowd says, however, that he’s received few frat-house gig requests, which surprised him. But the colleges themselves are finding silent shows useful for orientation-day events, which are among the 159 events he says Silent Events did last year.)
Headphone shows also allow music venues to continue hosting revelry well past typical municipal curfews by keeping the din down. It also allows patrons to move to other parts of a venue (within wireless range, of course), which could encourage consumption of other goods, from band merch to fried perch, thus increasing revenue and all without revelers missing a beat. Silent Events has added another dimension with a three-channel wireless system that lets clients use it for multiple music genres or multiple languages.
With the concert experience overall becoming more stratified, with multiple levels of VIP access, the silent-show component can easily be plugged into mainstream shows. And stand-alone silent shows may yet become more than a novelty — put it into one episode with the hipsters of HBO’s Girls and suddenly you’ll have an industry, let alone a business. Worth keeping an eye on
