Silly / Absurd

#93 · Bathroom microphone

Bring it to your lips and perform your full setlist with commitment. The acoustics in there are genuinely exceptional.

If you have never held a chopstick to your mouth and performed to a bathroom mirror as though closing out a stadium, there is a gap in your life that this entry exists to fill.

Why it works

A handheld microphone is about 18cm and held vertically a few centimetres from the mouth. A chopstick is close enough that your hand adopts the same position, and that posture genuinely does something - it lifts the chin, opens the throat and pushes the shoulders back. Singing teachers get students to do this on purpose. So the chopstick will not amplify you, but it may very slightly improve you.

Tips & warnings

• The bathroom is doing real work here. Hard tiled surfaces produce a long reverb tail that flatters almost any voice.
• Genuinely useful for rehearsing a speech or a best man's toast - it fixes your posture and gives your hands a job.
• It will not work as an actual microphone. We have checked.