For much of his time on screen, Whitaker wears a hood, which muffles his performance much less than the London accent he produces so diligently - the sounds he makes aren't wrong, any of them, but they don't have the expressiveness of his natural voice.
But the excessive intrusiveness of the live performance, with the music sometimes muffling the spoken dialogue, blunted the cumulative effect: the viewer's involvement in the sequence became a matter of observance, not participation.
Echoing a commonly held biker sentiment, he believes that factory-issued pipes, muffled by a decree of the Environmental Protection Agency, choke performance and are so quiet that car and truck drivers will not hear them.
But it's more likely just an awkward choice in a production that is not confrontational enough, muffling the pathos of its hard facts in virtuoso performance art and numbingly overwritten prose poetry.
So it's worth noting that one woman clutched her cell phone tightly in her hand during the performance I caught of The Whipping Man, hoping she could muffle the sound of the ringer while it went off during the performance.
Antony Walker conducted what seemed a vibrant performance, though the sound of the orchestra, especially the strings, was somewhat muffled by a stage extension that enhanced the intimacy of the theater but covered too much of the pit.
Attempting to minimize distractions, he installed cork doors to muffle the sound of the cash registers and would not allow drinks to be served during performances.
More broadly, however, muffle-furnace ashing is only one source of analytical error that contributes to the relatively poor overall performance revealed by Cox et al.
The walkway does muffle the sound of the orchestra somewhat, and some subtleties in the conductor Maurizio Benini's stylish and fleet performance were lost.
One was renowned for a voice like "a silver trumpet muffled in silk" and his performances as Hamlet and Prospero; the other famed for his "y'knows", glottal stops and turns at the dispatch box.
