Keyboard Sound For Gyms

April 22nd, 2012
contra, ideas, music
It's very hard to get good sound for contra dance music in a gym. What with the size of the hall and the amount of reflective surfaces it's always really boomy and muddy. Fixing this is very difficult, especially at folk festival pricing, but when we did our Childgroove set (where Amy sets the keyboard to synth and rocks out on bass) at DownEast we had people come up to us to say the synth sounded really good in the hall (a gym). Something about that electric piano sound helped it come through better.

Listening to Julie playing with La Banane Enchantee at NEFFA this afternoon, I was thinking: could you make a 'piano' sound optimized for a noisy gym? Designing it with that in mind it you should be able to make something that sounds much better in that situation.

You could even go one step further and do this as a computer program that also takes in a mic from the hall and dynamically creates the optimal keyboard sound for the environment it happens to be in.

Comment via: google plus, facebook, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Information control, isolation, and ideological abuse

[I have freelanced for a number of effective altruist organizations, such as the Centre for Effective Altruism and 80,000 Hours.

via Thing of Things March 11, 2026

The Newest Technology in Frozen

There are lots of different things in Frozen that are new-ish, but my dad and I were wondering: what is the actual newest thing in Frozen? This led me to watch Frozen a lot while taking notes. Some of the things I found included: Elastic hair-ties A safety …

via Lily Wise's Blog Posts March 1, 2026

2025-26 New Year review

This is an annual post reviewing the last year and setting intentions for next year. I look over different life areas (work, health, parenting, effectiveness, etc) and analyze my life tracking data. Highlights include a minimal group house, the usefulness…

via Victoria Krakovna January 19, 2026

more     (via openring)