Here’s a talk I presented as part of the NI Science Festival about what Zoom is quietly doing to try to help you hear each other, why this sometimes goes wrong, and how good “audio hygiene” can help you help Zoom. This was partly motivated by questions from music teachers, so I talk about both playing music and talking over Zoom.
This isn’t a how-to guide! If you’re a music teacher wanting to set up Zoom, you may find this article more helpful, supplemented with this article about the high-fidelity music mode that was introduced in August 2020. However, my broad overview may help you diagnose issues in your current set-up and maybe even fix them…
I’m keen to save you from watching the whole video, so you might want to consider these alternative formats before pressing play:
- You could scan through the slides to get an idea of what is covered and see if you can make sense of it from the slides alone.
- You could look at the Zoom FAQs that followed from this talk to see if others have asked something specific that you wanted to know.
- Take a look at the Zoom Audio Hygiene chart, although it doesn’t tell you why these audio hygiene tips make a difference.
Otherwise, here’s the talk:
Corrigendum: In the questions afterwards, I said that, for Zoom, people could only hear sounds directly from your computer when you shared your screen. This was true once, but a Zoom update made it possible to share just the audio, without sharing your screen—see the Zoom FAQs for details. Thanks to Graham G. for flagging it (I noticed your message in the chat after the talk) and @DavidJBird for the explanation.