One common arena for the display of hidden talent is the open mic. It seems that every town that is in the least bit musically inclined has a time and place for musicians to run rampant with new material, new voices, new music. While this sometimes has disastrous effects, it can also be the exact freedom from obscurity that fledgling artists seek.

I remember my first exposure to the phenomenon. In high school, I attended Latin Convention, an event at which all the Classics nerds in Ohio were thrown together in the same hotel for a long weekend. In the evenings, one of the corners of the ballroom was made smaller (probably to emulate that famed intimacy of the open mic) and a single microphone was placed in front of what seemed, from that vantage point, to be a stampede of chairs. I witnessed bad poetry and hilarious anecdotes, obscure Classics references and the occasional person who could actually play the guitar.

More recently, I spent my Winter Term in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in California. Near the wilderness in which I lost myself were the cities of Nevada City and Grass Valley. Both towns had weekly open mics that were true to their names, and sometimes others that were more picky about who would appear onstage.

I have never completely grasped this selective open mic.Really, if it isn’t going to be open, it should be a closed mic. That would make more sense.

This past year, a new coffee shop opened in my hometown of Granville, Ohio, graciously including a stage and a sound system-lite. The facility was long overdue in a town where the music scene is dead, mostly because there is no physical ground on which to conduct it. These days, however, bands have started to pop out of their garages and singer/songwriters have bashfully put tunes to those scribbles in their notebooks. With the coffee shop and a new small concert hall in the next town over, Granville finally has a venue.

You should know — we do it too. Oberlin has open mics in various incarnations: there are the Afrikan Heritage House’s “soul sessions,” the Third World’s “coffeehouse,” and there are occasional events by the very name of “open mic” at the Cat in the Cream. Sometimes, we even have special events that take on the guise of the open mic, such as Hip Hop 101’s Poetry Slam.

I know lots of students already take advantage of these events. So imagine how cool it would be if all the hundreds of people (I know you’re out there) who secretly play guitar in their rooms, writing lyrics on the sly, came out to show the campus what they’re up to.

That seems to be the conclusion I come to. There is a wall between the public and the potential additional talent.

Open up, Oberlin.