GridGirl

The Opera Theatre at the Sydney Opera House did this nightly until the 2017 refurbishment which included removal of the iron.

What's stopping him from wearing plugs when he's working? I appreciate he may need to take them out for certain tasks, but surely it must be possible to significantly reduce the overall exposure? I understand that he prefers to tune guitars without ear plugs and that there is a lot of re-tuning required for the main band he goes out with. I wonder if he's tried anything except the disposable squishy foam earplugs? Nothing sounds good through those. I would have thought he'd be an excellent candidate for electronic earplugs.

Our conductors generally only have two or three performances a week - the beauty of working in rep! Yes, rehearsals are more intense but they still don't have anything nike the number of calls as players do. Ballet conductors do do more shows (up to eight a week sometimes) however in our pit this isn't an issue - they don't cop the high volume stuff (yes, we've measured). The only time we've ever had an issue was a production of Don Quixote which had an onstage stockwhip crack which was so loud that the conductor couldn't stop herself instinctively ducking and putting her hands over her ears. It peaked at over 140dBC so they had to take action and the lash of the whip was altered so it wasn't so loud. Opera crew I don't think cop the massive sound levels. They're at a good distance from the singers, miles away from the orchestra and the backstage foldback is pretty quiet as a rule (our artistic director insists it's kept to the bare minimum).

Oh, we keep an eye on Facebook!

It's untested ground, and very tricky. We back up this data with pretty comprehensive education too - ten days ago we had our friendly audiologist horn player come down for another education session and he consistently tells them that they just have to wear earplugs as much as humanly possible (among other things!). I'd like to think that with the education as well as this comprehensive sound level graphing, that we would be able to prove that we did as much as we could, within that "reasonably practicable" framework. We do also tell them that they need to have their own personal hearing conservation plan, and that we can't do everything for them. Acoustic shock is one thing, but NIHL I think would be far more difficult to prove as having been caused by one specific workplace (or one single call) - it's gradual. So if it did ever get to court, you can bet that the question "did you ever do any work, involving playing your instrument, outside of your job with the orchestra?" would come up. Did you teach? Yes? How many hours a week on average? Do you have any idea how much noise you were exposed to in an average week doing that? How much practice do you do in your own time? Do you wear earplugs while practising? Did your employer issue you with earplugs and educate you on how to use them? Did your employer give you information about your projected sound level exposure, and instruct you about when you were required to be using earplugs? Did your employer provide education around hearing conservation? Did these other gigs that you were doing outside of your full-time work provide you with similar information, or measure your sound level exposure? Did you listen to death metal through headphones at high volumes at any point in your life? Do you use power tools at home, and do you use hearing protection when doing that? Have you been to rock concerts, and did they ever leave you with ringing in your ears afterward? It would be difficult for anyone to lay the blame for NIHL at the feet of one sole employer - I know the burden of proof in a civil case is lower than a criminal case, but I still don't think, unless you lived in a soundproof bubble outside of your workplace, you'd succeed.

For interest's sake, I thought I'd upload one of the estimated sound level exposure graphs I've just finished - this is for our upcoming winter opera season. There's a gap in the middle because we go into a season of West Side Story and during non-repertory seasons we have a table which tells us how many shows can be done per week given their sound level reading (we use this in ballet as well) - time-saving in that I don't have to enter the formulas for about 60 shows. WSS is included only where it overlaps the end of the first half of the opera season and the start of the second half (we rehearse WSS under the last week of rep shows, and then start rehearsals under the last week of WSS). The red line is the important one for us - it's the 7-day rolling weekly average, which needs to stay under 85dBA. Blue diamonds are individual days and the blue line is a seasonal average which we don't really pay much attention to. This graph belongs to one of our trumpet players. His weekly average tips over that 85dBA line once (and even then only just) thanks to careful rostering, but also helped by the season's repertoire. I know that this particular player extensively uses the Etymotic Music Pro electronic earplugs, so I don't have any concerns for him. All the players have been sent their graphs and if/where their weekly average is above 85dBA, they have been informed that they need to wear earplugs during that time period (and as much as possible everywhere else as well). As I get up-to-date sound level readings for each opera (this graph is based on previous readings) I'll go through and update and double check for any exceedances which weren't previously there. Time consuming? Yes. Makes me want to throw my computer across the room when I keep finding errors? Yep. But it's ultimately absolutely worth doing. Trumpet graph SW19.pdf

It seems like you might benefit from something other than Excel to process all this information. I'm no more than an enthusiastic amateur at this kind of stuff, but I've used Filemaker in similar circumstances, however there are definitely other packages out there which may be better suited to the task. In fact, it would be a great service to the industry if someone came up with a specific app for noise logging - there's probably a market for it. There probably is a market for it! My Excel spreadsheets are pretty well set up, it’s just that I had made a couple of stupid mistakes which I then didn’t notice until I’d done the find-and-replace to build another eight or so graphs.

Try music schools and colleges, music departments at universities? They're pretty much redundant these days with phone apps/electronic metronomes, so they may have them in cupboards somewhere...

I am now on my third attempt to PDF player sound level exposure graphs out of my stupidly complex Excel spreadsheets to send to the players. I'd done the whole brass, percussion and harp sections when I realised the readings for one show were placeholders and I was waiting on readings from our sister orchestra in Melbourne (we haven't done the show before) - fired off an e-mail, got the readings, fed them in (which changed the graphs quite considerably), amended them for the brass because they had trumpets in front of trombones in front of percussion, which we won't, and re-PDF'ed the graphs (same three sections). Then I got to our AP timpani/tutti percussion player's graph, and realised that his graph didn't take into account when he was playing timpani - all readings were the percussion ones. In the process of fixing that (which is doable but a little time consuming), I discovered an error where I'd put the wrong show on one particular date - and of course the one I should have put was a louder show. If it had been quieter, I wouldn't have bothered - but now I have to go through and fix that error in every single player's spreadsheet. I hate my life (and Excel, and noise monitoring) right now. Update: I'm now up to attempt number four. Not happy.

I think the crux of it is that the pit should never have been set up in the way that it initially was. He should never have had a trumpet bell a foot from his head. It was set up that way for artistic reasons, but when the crew set it up that day it should have been noticed and brought to someone’s attention and the rehearsal delayed until it was sorted, because a problem of this nature should really have been foreseen. I don’t think they shrugged it off, but it shouldn’t have got to that point. I do agree that the claimant is partially at fault as well and could have done a lot more to protect himself.

Modern brass instruments are capable of far, far greater volume than their period predecessors. Tchaikovsky would be astonished if he heard a modern brass section playing Swan Lake and I think Beethoven would be able to hear his Ninth Symphony despite being deaf. Large-bore brass is a comparatively modern invention, and as these instruments have been developed and come into orchestras and bands, volume levels have risen (everyone else comes up to balance). So by bringing the levels down, it's probably more authentic. When you start getting into 20th century stuff, probably to a degree the authenticity is impacted, yes. Seventeen brass players starting into Ride of the Valkyries made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and the sheer impact of the sound had a part to play in that. But earlier works (Romantic, Classical and definitely Baroque), it's arguable. It's a huge conversation which each orchestra is going to have to negotiate. As I said up-thread, we tried asking our players just to tell us what else they were doing and it ended badly (although I think we're about to broach it again). Very, very tricky, and I think players would be asking for significantly higher wages if contracts were exclusive. I agree that at the moment, it seems to be impossible.

I think it depends on the players. We mark parts down, so the dynamics they see are the reduced version. Our brass players are exceptionally good at lowering sound output but maintaining the intent of the music, and if they're playing quieter, everyone else does too. It really is a team effort - every single player has to be conscious of it and aware of it, and then the balance sorts itself out. Yes, it's sometimes impossible to play a high trumpet note at a quieter dynamic - just not physically possible. But if you play down on the bits that you can, leaving only the bits that you can't play down at full volume, it still goes a long way to reducing overall sound exposure. And if the conductor is across what has to be done, that helps too, because they can sort out the balance if it's wrong (ie tell the required people to shut up).

This is a very good question and one to which I don’t have an answer. We broached the idea of our permanent players informing us of outside work for this reason, and it ended in a player rep storming out of a meeting in a rage. And that wasn’t even considering telling them they couldn’t do other work, just asking them to tell us. This is why I think a claim for NIHL wouldn’t succeed, because you couldn’t pin it to one specific event or employer. This case is different though, due to it being acoustic shock and one event as the problem. All we can do is educate them as much as we possibly can.

If that is extrapolated in the broader sense of Risk Assessment, that the unforeseeable is the legal responsibility of the responsible person, how do we create RA's or manage H&S? For me H&S management is imagining the worst possible hazards and risk and taking steps to avoid them, a kind of benevolent paranoia. If we can't even envisage the possibility of something how can we be held legally responsible for managing it? I am still puzzled that they upheld Justice Davies's decision to recognise a medical condition when consultants disagreed and I hadn't realised that the claimant was diagnosed with NIHL two years previously but I can let those go. I do think this "unforeseeable" ruling is "difficult". It's an interesting conundrum, that's for sure. The whole acoustic shock thing now of course has precedent in law (I'm not sure if British precendent holds in Australia or not?) which I guess means that regardless of whether you think it's a real thing or not, it has to be considered. I think that what this means for pit orchestras is that artistic considerations (which I believe was the reason that the orchestra was set up the way it was) will always now have to come second to WHS considerations. The fact that they were able to rearrange the pit to reduce noise levels, as I said in an earlier post, is what I think did them in - it should have been set up that way from the start. We send conductors a proposed pit plan for each work and request feedback, however we have no qualms about saying "no we can't do that for noise reasons" whereas that may not have happened in this case. Classic example: our bass section is not close to our cello section, in our "usual" setup. Very much not ideal. We could swap over the horns and the basses, which artistically would be far better for both of them, however our horns sit in front of the brass wall which has an angled Perspex top. The horn players' heads are below the Perspex, so they're protected from the volume, but because the basses sit higher, they would have their heads above the Perspex and in the line of fire. Conductors have requested it and we just tell them that we understand, but that we simply can't. In my opinion, a combination of options 1 and 2 is what will happen. Option 4 in a watered-down version may well happen, in that loud works are not removed, but played less often. There is also an option 6, which is that the ROH changes the way their player rosters are done. From what I understand, each player has a "buddy" and the workload is split between the two of them by their own agreement. This doesn't take noise exposure into account at all - someone might end up doing a Strauss, a Puccini and a Tchaikovsky work and their buddy doing three Mozart works, which leads to a very unbalanced noise load. It's still more relevant for NIHL than the acoustic shock issue, but we do find that noise exposure is cumulative and a level that doesn't bother you at the start of a season is very problematic when you've had four heavy weeks. I don't know if this makes you more susceptible to acoustic shock or not, although my gut feeling is that if you're already feeling like your ears are beaten up, it wouldn't take as much as it would with fresh ears. I think they'll go to a model more like ours where noise exposure is predicted for each season and taken into account with the rostering.

I think the major thing to remember here is that pit orchestras and symphony orchestras have a very different way of working. Pit orchestras are always going to be far more susceptible to noise issues due to the nature of the work. Not saying that a symphony orchestra doesn’t have to take due care, but they don’t have the issues that we have. We did 22 performances of Turandot between January and March. It’s one of the loudest works in the repertoire. We do 20 or 21 performances of Sleeping Beauty (the loudest of the three Tchaikovsky ballets) in three weeks. A symphony orchestra might be playing a Mahler symphony, but they’ll have maybe 4 rehearsal calls and 2 performances over a week, and the program will have a couple of other works on it too. Plus a concert hall platform will hopefully have fewer space concerns than a pit, plus you have risers available which makes a big difference. There are still problems, but they’re less severe. There definitely needs to be more research into acoustic shock - I must discuss it with our friendly audiologist - he may know something about any research happening. I can tell you exactly what it looks like, a colleague and I having carried a player suffering from it out of the pit, and interestingly he was diagnosed with it immediately, I believe given steroids to help with it and after a month off, back at work with no further issues. From memory, this was in 2015, so not all that long after the ROH incident.

There are some very interesting points in the judgement, and on reading it I understand why they lost the appeal (but geez I feel bad for Matt Downes, I had a few email conversations with him and he was always exceptionally helpful). Here are my thoughts: The judge found that the ROH had provided the claimant with custom moulded earplugs shortly after he joined in 2002. The incident happened in 2012 - ten year old earplugs realistically won’t offer anything like the protection they do when new. We tell our guys that they should be replaced in less than five years, more frequently if they’re in use a lot (and I have a spreadsheet which tracks when players get new plugs). The silicon hardens over time, the plugs don’t seal as well and also become more difficult to get in and out, which means people don’t use them. I don’t know whether the non-replacement of plugs falls on the player or the management though. On 3 September Ms Mitchell attended a meeting with Mr Downes, the principal trumpet player, the principal viola player and other members of the viola section. They discussed the noise issues which the viola section had experienced and the measurements taken at the afternoon rehearsal of 1 September. In consultation with the conductor, Sir Anthony Pappano, the orchestra layout was rearranged. A gap of one metre was created between the brass and the violas, and some of the brass were relocated to another part of the pit. Noise measurements taken after the rearrangement at a rehearsal on 11 September showed that the noise levels had significantly decreased. We set out the comparative tables for 1 and 11 September later in this judgment.. I think this is what might have done them in. I still do not, and will never, understand why he didn’t get up and say something about it being unbearably loud as soon as they started playing, but the fact that they were able to reduce noise levels quite significantly by rearranging the pit indicates to me that that second layout should have been used from the beginning and someone should have flagged it. We do not agree with the judge’s apparent conclusion that Regulation 7(3) is to be interpreted in the absolutist way put forward by Mr Huckle, at least in its application to the playing of classical music and opera. “Reasonably practicable” is not the same as “physically practicable”. We accept the ROH’s case that it was not reasonably practicable for players in their orchestra pit to perform if they were to be required to wear PHPs at all times. We set aside the judge’s finding of a breach of Regulation 7(3), and the consequential finding at paragraph 212 of a breach of Regulation 10(1). This I am very glad to see, because that part of the original judgement concerned me a lot. There are times when players just cannot wear earplugs This is going to change the way pit orchestras do things, undoubtedly. Interestingly enough, in light of the comment in the judgement about a lack of real-time sound level measurements, a (brilliant) sound engineer here in Sydney is developing a system which does give you instant real-time readings, along with also including a monitor system (yes, it does involve wearing headphones) which enable you to turn the orchestra mix and a vocal mix up or down - obviously this entails mic’ing of the orchestra and some sort of area mic’ing for singers, but we do that anyway for our Vivace system, and I think it’s going to give us a lot more information and control over sound level exposure. We’ve had an extensive look at our hearing conservation strategies, and had several experts in to look at them, and there are some differences in our processes which do make me feel somewhat reassured, but it’s still a massive shockwave in the orchestral community.

Show on/show off only affects the freelance players - we have 58 (or so? Should be 62 but we have some vacancies right now) permanent players who are on salary, so they are unaffected. Freelance players obviously get paid per call; if anything it is actually more work for freelancers because we need six oboes, for example, instead of three if they were playing every night, or perhaps five if we were "rostering through" where you might play two nights out of three. With only four oboes as permanent musicians, we need two freelancers to fill that gap. That cost gets factored into budgets, because we can usually predict pretty well which shows are going to be louder and therefore need more players. In terms of consistency it's pretty good - we rehearse as two "teams" - so everything gets rehearsed twice - and those teams stay as consistent as we can, short of illness where the player from the other team gets called in to replace the sick player. String players aren't quite so rigid in the rostering and it's not quite one on, one off for them, as their sound levels are generally lower. They probably do two nights in three, except the principal/associate principal of each section who do one on, one off. We're also careful to rotate seating so that it's not the same viola and cello players in front of percussion more than one night in a row. Other work is a very, very contentious issue. We've tried to implement permanent players at least letting us know what else they're doing (loads of them teach, a few play in church bands, one does a lot of gigging around the city, some of them dep in musicals), and it ended in a player rep storming out of a meeting in fury. So we can't take other work into account, and can only give them the figures for what they're doing with us. To be honest, it would greatly increase the complexity of my spreadsheet if I had to take that into account so I don't mind in that way! We keep telling them to wear earplugs whenever they can, and I know quite a few do while teaching, but that's about all we can do. They're not contractually obliged to not do other work, we'd never get away with that! And Paul - I still run around like a headless chicken moving chairs, stands and instruments, frantically sorting out a sconce light which has gone out at 7:29pm, bumping out three truckloads of orchestral equipment, pushing it all about 150m through a foyer to the only place we could load from, or solving some other dire issue which of course only happened one minute before tuning - I don't think I'll ever be hands-off!

I've just finished my bi-annual Excel mission to create predicted sound exposure graphs for all our players for the upcoming season (it's a good couple of days of staring at Excel until I go cross-eyed) where we have Turandot (very loud, 3 hours long), Wozzeck (very loud, mercifully only 1hr40mins long) and Salome (atomically loud, once again mercifully only 1hr40mins long) in rep, along with La boheme and Werther (neither particularly loud). We've rostered our players very, very carefully to minimize potential issues, and we've created as much space for respite in the schedule as possible, but it's not always achievable to avoid things like a Turandot/Wozzeck double call day simply due to our jammed-tight schedule - we pay so much for the SOH that we have to maximize our use of the venue. We're also mid-season on a production of Spartacus right now, which has caused us huge dramas in the past (it's a very densely orchestrated score with lots of battle/fight scenes which are all very loud!), but thanks to some exceptionally careful planning and contingency plans, it's actually been OK. We planned for the worst and hoped for the best, basically; players are rostered night on, night off, and we rostered a third team of trumpets to cover in case the players needed extra respite - and they've been used, so it was worth it. Plus our refurbished pit has helped - we can put absorptive panels around the walls and roof, and they make a difference of up to 3dB which is massive. We started out without too many in (enough to protect the back desks of the lower strings from the large percussion section) and added more in around the brass once we had sound level readings in, and it's made life far better for the brass players. They don't like having to constantly play softer as it becomes very hard on their embouchures and we start risking injury, so while the panels soak up sound and make the acoustic dryer, they also know they can play out more without the levels going too high. And the dry acoustic can be remedied to a certain degree with our fancy "electro-acoustic environment" system we have in the pit too (testing the system was hilarious - one of the boys asked for a German cathedral acoustic and promptly got it - never before has the pit had a five second reverb time!).

One of the horn players in the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, up the coast from us, is also an audiologist. Unsurprisingly his interest lies in musicians’ hearing and he’s been part of quite a lot of research in this area. Some of these articles are only abstracts unless you want to pay, but some are the full article: First Second Third Fourth Fifth Sixth

Not at all! If you want any more detail (I haven't quite put all of it here!) feel free to drop me a line.

Reducing exposure to as low a level as practicable is, I think, the way that things are headed. Yes, there is NOTHING like the sound of seventeen brass players going crazy on Ride of the Valkyries, and the volume levels are part of that, but more and more there are ways around it. We almost always mark brass parts down, particularly in ballets; we now have a very sophisticated sound system in the theatre (the Vivace system) which through some very complicated technical wizardry, a patron hears what sounds like a natural sound from their seat but it's actually amplified in such a way that you hear the balance that you expect to hear (so if you're closer to the brass, you hear more of them) rather than a flat amplification the same throughout the theatre. This means that our guys can play more quietly but the operator can boost their sound accordingly but in a much more "realistic" way. We've only had it in place since January and it's still settling in, but with an assistant conductor in the hall during rehearsals to work with the operators, we've been getting some pretty good results. The hardest part is getting the conductor to realise that what they hear on the podium is NOT what the audience is hearing - some of them struggle with this. The rest period thing is also vital. The ROH system of rostering (where each player has a buddy and the workload is split between the two players by mutual agreement) doesn't take this into account at all, IMHO. We roster far more strictly to give players respite - for instance, on a show we know is going to be loud, we will do our absolute utmost to avoid anyone doing double days, or worse, the Friday evening-Saturday matinee-Saturday evening triple whammy. It takes time, energy and can make your brain hurt (it's like a twisted Sudoku puzzle most of the time) but it has to be done.

The plexiglass shields are awful - they slap back the sound to the player behind them, increasing their noise exposure by a lot. Fine for the person in front of them, but not for whoever is behind it. I can't put them in our pit without causing players to walk out in mutiny. There are soft shields called GoodEars available (designed in Australia - there's a link on that page to them) which we use and they're very good, but they can cause sightline issues obviously. I know the ROH has all sorts of different sound protection available for players, but from what I've heard, their pit is not spacious and so you can't always get a screen in where one would be ideal. It's fraught, really. We have a culture (and it's taken a long time to develop) where players will stand up and say "this is unsafe, something needs to be done about the seating" but from what I gather, it's not necessarily the same in other orchestras. Baseline tests are vital - we've been doing them for a long time, and we also block book hearing tests for our players annually.

So the ROH is appealing the judgement, as I thought they would (my counterpart there said they were looking into it last time I spoke with him): https://www.thestrad.com/news/royal-opera-house-will-take-landmark-hearing-damage-case-before-court-of-appeal/8286.article We are following with great interest...particularly as we've just done our annual round of hearing tests for all players!

Doesn’t make a blind bit of difference in the opera world though - we only ever amplify a) Opera on Sydney Harbour, where we don’t generally have the noise concerns that occur in our pit, due to the orchestra studio being not completely enclosed (the walls never go to the roof!), and copious amounts of acoustic blanketing which can be used because the orchestra is mic’ed as well so balance is managed by the sound engineer, not the players; and b) musical theatre seasons. We run a much smaller orchestra during the musicals, which of course means everyone has more space and we can separate the noisy instruments better, make sure there’s a “buffer zone” between noisy instruments and those in front of them, and put in baffling and headshields without obstructing people’s view of the conductor. And we’ve done the “silent disco” - late 2016 when we did Sydney Opera House: The Opera, otherwise known as The Eighth Wonder, it was presented on the steps of the SOH itself. Orchestra was in one of the smaller venues in the building (the Studio) and singers were of course mic’ed. Our amazing sound designer decided instead of speakers, he’d give every audience member a pair of headphones (with a radio receiver). It also got around the problem of people who live in the very expensive apartments on Circular Quay complaining about the noise, like the do for all the forecourt concerts. I didn’t see the show, being busy minding the orchestra, but apparently it worked really well.

This is what we’re all struggling with. We’re having some good success with electronic earplugs (which I’ve mentioned here before) but they’re not perfect. I think technology will eventually catch up but we’re not quite there yet. If all the performers start making claims it will be them who are ending orchestras. It'll all be synthesised or studio recorded orchestra work after that. This particular case, to be fair, is pretty extreme. I’ve been in my current job for a little over seven years and despite our awful pit, we’ve never had an episode like this one. I have seen one case of acoustic shock (a colleague and I pretty much carried the player out of the pit as he was so physically affected that he couldn’t walk and his vision was affected) but it was much less severe and after a month or so off, the musician was fine. However all our players know that if they are having a problem, they GET OUT OF THE PIT AND COME AND FIND US IMMEDIATELY. This is what is totally boggling me in this case; I would have thought, given the description of the pit setup, the player would have realised after two minutes that it was going to be problematic and gone to tell someone - Valkyrie doesn’t ease you in gradually so I cannot understand why he stayed in the pit to the point where the hearing injury happened. All our music stands have a full A4 sheet about hearing conservation and what to do in particular situations attached to them, and pretty much the first thing on the page is “you are within your rights to leave the pit at any time if you are finding the sound levels too much.” Words to that effect, anyway. I personally think that a lot of the issues are due to modern instruments. Brass instruments in particular are much easier to play at high volumes than they used to be when a lot of these works were written. While those practically earth-shattering moments in Swan Lake or Sleeping Beauty will always have been loud, the instruments that Tchaikovsky would have written for wouldn’t have been capable of the same levels as today’s are. So we mark dynamics down in the parts where necessary, and I should say that our brass players are exceptionally good at moderating their sound output where they have to. It does also come down to conductors being aware that sometimes they can’t get exactly what they want from the orchestra and they have to deal with that. Some are better than others about this!