Electric piano sound keeps dropping out on Zoom

April 25, 2023 2:26 PM

My kid has been doing piano lessons via Zoom, and lately his teacher hasn't been able to hear his playing. What is going on?

We've been doing virtual piano lessons with no problems since 2020, but in the past couple of months, the sound has been cutting out on the teacher's end. (We can generally hear her fine.) Talking is no problem, but once he starts playing, the sound comes in and out intermittently. He plays an electric piano; the teacher and I are on iPhones. We've tried being on data and on reliable WiFi, and she's tried being on her computer instead, and nothing seems to make a difference. We've since switched to FaceTime, and that seems to work fine with no sound issues, but what's going on with the sound on Zoom?

posted by pised to Technology (5 answers total)

You need to select “use original audio” from within “settings” (the gear in upper left on iPhone app) -> “meeting settings”-> “audio”
posted by lucasks at 2:32 PM on April 25, 2023 [11 favorites]

If you’re using a phone to capture the sound, rather than connecting the piano to a computer via usb or something, I would imagine Zoom is interpreting it as ambient noise and filtering. I would bet that it’s leaving the notes that are in the same frequency range as human speech are not getting filtered, which is why it’s intermittent. There’s probably a setting to turn off filtering, although I don’t have access to Zoom at the moment to check. FaceTime doesn’t care as much about filtering, which is why it works for you. But Zoom’s brand is built on being good for business meetings, and lots of background noise is bad for that.
posted by kevinbelt at 2:43 PM on April 25, 2023 [5 favorites]

On a computer there is a setting "Original sound for musicians", in Audio under "Audio Profile"; if this is available on the phone you probably want to enable it. According to the help, this disables noise suppression, removes high pass filtering, and disables automatic gain adjustment -- the latter is the most likely suspect to me for the symptoms you are describing. At a minimum, you may want to disable "Automatically adjust microphone volume" if that's available.
posted by advil at 3:03 PM on April 25, 2023 [5 favorites]

I taught orchestra over Zoom for an entire year. Lucasks is correct.
posted by charmedimsure at 8:00 PM on April 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Brilliant answers--thank you, all!
posted by pised at 11:22 AM on April 26, 2023