UCI Sound will (probably) NOT be at the 2016 URTA Reviews

When prospective theatre design students start researching grad schools, they often very quickly find their way to URTA.  URTA plays a number of important roles in the American Theater, and one of the most visible is that they host a series of audition & interview sessions where actors, directors, designers, and stage managers can see and be seen by a large number of MFA training programs.

UCI participates in the URTA review program, typically sending faculty of all areas out to meet potential students.  But, this year, for a couple of reasons, the Sound Design program will probably not be attending the URTA review.

If you are interested in the Sound Design program at UCI, please do not expect to meet us at URTA. Instead, please reach out directly to either Head of Sound Design Mike Hooker or Head of Design Vincent Olivieri. Both of us are happy to correspond with you as you work to determine which schools are most appropriate for your application this winter.

Good luck in your search this year! We'll miss seeing you at URTAs, but we look forward to your emails and correspondence!

Two Neat Sound Things on NPR today

On my drive into work this morning, there were two (yes, TWO!) interesting articles on NPR about sound. The first was from 'The Loh Down on Science:' a piece about how the frequency of amplitude oscillation of a shout is what makes it so grating to our ears. Sandra Tsing Loh is on the faculty at UCI, so this piece is extra special because of that.

The second piece was on Morning Edition and was a piece about biologist/soundnerd Katy Payne's discover of how elephants communicate subsonically.  I often discuss Payne's research in my Introduction to Sound Design class, and I was delighted to learn more about her work this morning (and correct some misconceptions that I had).

Check them out!

USITT SOUND COMMISSION ANNOUNCES 2016 SOUNDLAB STUDENT PROJECTS

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The USITT Sound Commission is excited to announce the 2016 SoundLab Student Project.  Building on previous success, the 2016 SoundLab will focus on sound design content and creation for multi-channel theatrical playback. The SoundLab Student Project is a six-month long sound design project that culminates in opportunities for students to design in the 2016 SoundLab.

Beginning in summer 2015, USITT will take applications from student sound designers from high school, college, and graduate school programs. Each student will work with a mentor to analyze a play and develop a sound design concept. In December, students will submit their research and concept to the SoundLab Student Project organizers. The organizers will review all of the student submissions and invite selected students to move on to the second phase of the project.

In the second phase of the project, students will work with their mentors to turn their sound design concept into a realized piece of sound design. Again, students will submit their work to the SoundLab Student Project organizers, who will review the submissions. From the submissions, a small group of students will be invited to install their design in the 2016 SoundLab at the USITT Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah.

In Salt Lake City, each student will have a reserved time slot to work with their mentor and USITT SoundLab staff to implement their design in the custom-built multi-channel SoundLab. Each design will then become a permanent part of the 2016 SoundLab, accessible by any attendee at the conference and possibly archived on the web.

Mentors can be current teachers or professors of the student, but if a student needs a mentor, USITT will help match students with mentors.

SoundLab 2016 Director of Programming Vincent Olivieri says that “the Student Project in Salt Lake City will be an exceptional opportunity for students from a wide range of backgrounds to work on a challenging project and make connections with sound designers from across the country.” Student Project Coordinator Drew Dalzell adds that students who participate “will have a unique opportunity to see a project through from conception, through research, and finally to its execution.”

Registration information can be found here.

Additional support for this project comes from Figure 53 and Samuel French.

For more information, email Olivieri at olivieri@uci.edu.

Happy Birthday Pierre Schaeffer!

It's Pierre Schaeffer's 105th birthday today!  He was a pioneer in the use of samples, so if you use samples in your work at all (and that includes 99.9% of sound designers), you owe him a debt of gratitude.

Check out a longer post on him over at Create Digital Music.

Sweet Smell of Success

This weekend will be the final performances for the final show of our 2014-2015 "Love, Lust, and Greed" season -- Sweet Smell of Success.
This show was a huge undertaking from a sound design perspective, both technically and artistically.  With 16 instrumentalists and 7 singers in the pit, and 18 cast members on stage, there was no shortage of energy coming from the stage.  It was a pleasure as sound designer to get to help create and shape this music, in a way that only sound design really can, and I was very proud of my work.

The musical follows JJ Hunsecker (a dramatization of Walter Winchell - WW) and Sidney Falcone on a journey of political and social corruption.  In bringing the show to life, I had the pleasure of meeting Wes Dooley, the owner of Audio Engineering Association, Inc. (AEA), a local company that makes ribbon microphones by hand, to the exact specification of the old RCA ribbon microphones.  The microphone that Mr. Dooley and AEA so generously allowed us to borrow for the show was their museum-quality reproduction of the RCA 44 - the same mic that sat on WW's desk.  It has a captivating sound that brought a different character to the "broadcasted" moments.  A huge thank you to AEA and Mr. Dooley for your generosity and support.

In addition to live mics on stage, the show came with a significant playback undertaking.  With such a vast stage and gestural set pieces, a lot of the responsibility for establishing period, location, and time of day landed with lighting and sound.  There were some wonderful moments that the lighting designer Darrin and I had an opportunity to track Sidney's journey, which made for some uniquely well-integrated moments in the show.

It was such a pleasure to design this show with such a wonderful team.  If you haven't gotten to see the show, it's running until June 6.  Tickets are available from the Arts Box Office.

"Today's gossip is tomorrow's headline."

--Matt

Welcome to the Class of 2018!

Mike and I, along with the rest of the sound design program, are delighted to introduce our two incoming students. Garrett Hood and Jordan Tani will join us in the fall as the MFA Class of 2018! Welcome to both of them!

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Garrett is a recent graduate of Ohio University, where he received a BFA in Production Design & Technology with an emphasis in sound and lighting design. During his time at Ohio, he composed music and designed sound for eight shows, including All This Intimacy, Swimming in the Shallows, bobrauschenbergamerica, and Blood Knot. In addition, he became enthralled by working on new plays after designing and assisting numerous times on the Seabury Quinn Jr. Playwrights Festival. Outside of school, Garrett spent a summer at the Monomoy Theatre on Cape Cod, where he designed eight shows (including two musicals) during their 2014 season. Some of these credits include Kiss Me Kate, Blood Knot, Twelfth Night, and The Man Who Came to Dinner. During the summer of 2015, he can be found in Ithaca, NY, serving as the sound design fellow at the Hangar Theatre. Garrett has a strong preoccupation with the sounds of everyday life, as well as creating new sonic environments with textural music and sound. He loves composing music, making strange sounds, and experimental photography. Garrett is ecstatic to be joining the sound design department at UCI, and to be finally rid of the unpredictable Ohio winters of his childhood. Some of his work can be found at http://ghhdesigns.com

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Jordan Tani is a sound designer, projection designer, musician, performer, foley artist, and composer with experience in recording and mixing sound/music. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Music Literature and Technology from the University of California, San Diego. He approaches his designs by combining naturalism with a strong musical background to create a stylized sound that affects the experiences of both performer and listener. He is most interested in creating realistic and natural soundscapes that transport the listener into the unique world of the story, whether that be through theatre, animation, or purely sound itself. In his free time, he is a composer and performer of taiko. He practices other instruments including cello and shinobue and tries to find the time to relax and play the occasional video game with friends.

Jeff Awards

We're delighted to share that Karli Blalock, 2014 Honors in Sound Design grad, been nominated for a Jeff Award for Best Sound Design, Non-Equity! The Jeff Awards cover the greater Chicago Area, so Karli was nominated out of a huge pool.

Congratulations Karli!

The RCA 44

With Sweet Smell of Success preparations underway, this week Mike volunteered to bring in his restored vintage RCA 44 microphone for us to listen to (and for our amazing props master Pam to look at).  It's not every day we get to listen to microphones like this, and it was a treat!

We AB-tested the mic on Mark's acoustic and Ben's electric guitars, against one of our Earthworks M50s.  Both mics went into the Avid preamp (since it has an impedance selector), gain matched, and into ProTools.  We were all pretty amazed by the big (not noisy) sound it gave everything, and even when we moved the mics away from the guitars, by comparison the 44 made the omni mic sound brittle.

RCA44 Frequency response (not showing proximity effect!)

After a few minutes of tracking, I tried EQ-ing the omni to match the timbral differences.  We got close, but of course the natural "compression" the heavy ribbon gives the sound is not something you can get in digital-land. The Earthworks capsule is just too fast.

Just for fun, we re-patched the 44 into the Summit Audio tube EQ and compressors. What a beautiful sound!

I'm super grateful for the critical listening opportunities like this that really only come from a grad school program like ours.  Thanks Mike!

Creating Sounds from Scratch: Final Projects

One of my favorite classes to teach at UCI is called Drama 267: Creating Sounds from Scratch. It’s a class with a bit of breadth, starting out discussing modular synthesizers (oscillators, modulators, LFOs) and using software emulators to explore how the pieces fit together.  We spend about a third of the class on that topic, but the last two thirds of the class focuses on modular audio/control programming using a piece of software called Max/MSP. Max/MSP can do lots of things, but my focus tends to be on logic and control methods. Over the quarter, we learn how to get midi and OSC messages into the software, how to manipulate the information in useful ways, and how to use it to control sound and midi objects (both software and meatspace). We explore many methods of control, simple midi keyboards, including iphone/ipad devices (various software apps), Jazzmutant Lemurs, Wii Remotes, and (occasionally, but not this quarter), xbox Kinnect devices.

The students have two big projects to work on for the class, and the last one is to build a user-modifiable sonic event. Each project has to have some sort of narrative arc and needs to be controllable using a piece of hardware.  The final projects are always very interesting, but this year, they were truly exceptional.  Here’s a taste:

Jacques is one of our advanced undergraduate students, and he held his own in this graduate course quite well.  His final project used an iphone to simulate a computer keypad for defuse a bomb. He used Max/MSP to send a visual code to the iphone, which needed to be replicated by the user in order to successfully defuse the bomb.  At each successful code entry position, the user was rewarded with a snarky comment.  If the user made a mistake, she blew up.

Adam is our other advanced undergraduate student, and create a simple baseball game.  A pitcher threw a ball, and the user used the iphone to swing.  Based on the parameters of the swing, the user would miss or hit the ball in a certain direction. In the background, we can hear cars passing by, and if the direction that the user hits the ball matches the position of the cars during their pass, the baseball would hit the car, resulting in a very angry driver coming over to give you what-for.

Andrea and Ben (team first-year) used wii-remotes to execute samples and navigate through an EDM song. Buttons controlled snare sounds, shakes controlled kick sounds, and only a rapid-fire user-executed snare sequence would advance from one section to the next section.

Kelsi and Matt (team second-year) used eight wii-remotes to create a version of the Hunger Games ‘reaping’ sequence. Each student in the class was able to volunteer to be a tribute, and once the tributes were selected, they faced off using their remotes as both scythes and bow-and-arrows.  I, playing the part of Donald Sutherland, got to send various genetically-modified animals to pester them as they fought.

Brian and Mark (team third-year) created a four-person game using iphones that let the four players try to kill each other with different weapons.  Each weapon had a different negative or positive impact on the opponent, and as the game progressed, lovely 8-bit sound effects accompanied the destruction.

In general, I was really impressed by these projects.  I used to teach this class every year, but I’ve had to switch to teaching it every three years.  I can’t wait to see what turns up when I teach this class again in 2018!

UCI Students Looking Good!

The Annual Report by USITT has come out, and the Sound Lab, which Prof. Mike Hooker helped to organize, features prominently in the publication. But when I was thumbing through the document this morning, Mike wasn't the only UCI person to make an impact in the document.  On page 13, wearing headphones and standing to legendary mix engineer Buford Jones' right, is Mark Caspary '15. Mark was part of a series of mixing intensives run by Jones and Jim VanBergen to mentor young designers and engineers in mix techniques. 

And I may be wrong, but on the cover of the report, that profile, hat, and stance look an awfully lot like Matt Glenn '14. 

Looking good, gents!

Waves.wav

It turns out that ocean waves are a pretty common through line in many of our shows this year... Metamorphoses, even without real water on stage, has movement that just begs for stormy waves; the directing students are doing Shakespeare's Tempest; and Mark's designs for The Liquid Plain (his thesis!) and The Odyssey (which he will be designing in Italy this winter!) both take place near (or on) the ocean.  It's so fortunate that we live so close to the local talent.

(Or maybe we secretly wanted an reason to go to the beach)

Mark monitors the sounds of the ocean

Honestly, who could resist the ability to record a wide multitrack of the Pacific?  I gave the California State Parks department a call, and asked for their permission and their thoughts on a quiet time we might be able to record. As it turns out, we found Corona Del Mar after sunset, and Huntington Beach around midday, both fairly empty (but for a group of UCI undergrad students who very kindly agreed to pause their conversations until we finished our recording -- thanks for your patience and help!).  Listening back, there were some great results, and we are both very excited to layer the recordings into our shows.

  

The strip of beach we had to ourselves at Huntington must have been close to a young seagull nest.  Probably a dozen baby seagulls, just barely able to flap their wings, were running in and out of the water.  In a few seconds worth of the recordings, you can hear the sound of their feet running on the wet sand, and a quiet squeak when the water comes a little too close.

Completely unedited ocean waves below, or come see Metamorphoses and The Liquid Plain to hear it in context! 

Los Angeles Ovation Nominations

Every year, the LA Ovation Awards celebrate the best of LA-area theatre. This year's nominations are out, and for the first time, one of our own alumni is among the nominees! Noelle Hoffman MFA '11 was nominated for her co-design of Wicked Lit 2013, produced by Unbound Productions. Congratulations Noelle!

The rest of the Sound Design nominees include a number of familiar faces to the UCI Sound Design program. Drew Dalzell was Noelle's co-designer for Wicked Lit; Drew is a frequent guest critic for thesis productions (most recently last spring), guest artist in class, and has been a great supporter of our program in general. John Gottlieb teaches at CalArts, way up the road, but he also has been a thesis critic at UCI. Cricket Myers has also sat in the critic's chair.  John Zalewski (who has two nominations, which is actually chump change compared to last year's FIVE) has been both a thesis critic and a guest artist in our classrooms.

Congratulations to all of the nominations, but of course, I hope Noelle & Drew win!

Your bag of chips may betray you...

Laser microphones have actually been around for decades.  Point a coherent light source at the outside of a window and the vibrations from inside will deflect that beam proportionally.  Looks like the folks at MIT have come up with a truly novel way of capturing sound using only high speed video pointed at objects sympathetically vibrating in a sound field:

From discovery.com "Conversation Heard in Potato Chip Bag Vibrations"

I really loved that Shazam was able to determine the DNA of the song from one of these video sound captures!  The audio interpolated from the 60FPS video really intrigues me, too -- I'm still trying to wrap my head around the physics.

Don't Break the Circle

UCI Sound MFA student Matthew Eckstein and Honors in Sound Design undergrad Karli Blalock recently sound designed a project called Elysian Roux. This excitingly unusual piece of theatre was meant to be the first mounting of an immersive theatre piece conceived by Vincent Olivieri and Mike Floyd. We spent two weeks working intensely on the project, and the results were pretty outstanding. Elysian Roux took place on UCI’s campus, all around the Claire Trevor School of the Arts. This presented some obvious challenges for the sound team, especially considering we had no budget. After gathering every extra speaker and amp available in the shop, we were left with 7 passive speakers, 5 amps, and hundreds of feet of Speakon cable. What we hoped to achieve with the design was establishing the location, creating a rather hellish mood, and acting as a device to help the actors know where the rest of the cast was so that each scene would sync up.  All of these functions, of course, had to fit in a fluid and consistent bed of sound. With such a large playing space and so few speakers, this presented quite a challenge!

We found ways to use the space to reflect the sound in the most effective ways. For instance, we placed one speaker in the amphitheatre, playing a neutral loop, and because of the acoustics in the amphitheatre, this one speaker filled in the silence of an area of about 300 ft of pathway. Most centrally, we had an alcove that played a 27 minute long loop of unearthly ambience; within the alcove, we placed 2 Ramsa A-80s – one in a corner, facing the opposite wall, and the other in the center facing towards the mouth of the ‘cave.’ Pointing a speaker towards a wall!?! In this case, the reflections and natural reverberations within the cement alcove were exactly what we needed to create the ominous and cavernous sound we were aiming for.

We also placed a RH speaker in a tunnel, which we called Hell’s mouth. This loop was triggered as the spirits began to emerge from the underworld and continued to reverberate throughout the space until the end of the show.

Hell's Mouth Ambience track embedded here:

Of course we couldn’t keep all our equipment laying out every night, so we had to strike after every rehearsal and performance. Vinnie let us keep all of our equipment in his office, along with all the props and set dressings. The entire team’s Tetris skills finally paid off!
Overall this project was a fun challenge and very rewarding. Audience members called it “delicious and disturbing” and “a unique interactive experience.”  As this project (and backstory) continue to grow, we are all hoping to see future productions of Elysian Roux.  But remember… don’t break the circle.

Hellaciously yours,
Karli and Matt

Yehaw!! UCI Sound goes to USITT SoundLab, Fort Worth.

This past week, five UCI Sound MFA students and our fabulous faculty took a trip south to Fort Worth for the annual USITT convention.  This year, thanks to a whole host of its sponsors including our friends at Meyer Sound, d&b audiotechnik, Yamaha, and Shure to name a few, USITT put on it's second version of SoundLab! SoundLab was a wonderful way for us to get our hands on some new gear, and have some time to explore it and hear it.

The adventures started on Sunday and Monday, as a whole group of us sound students from across the country loaded in the first PA system - one of their new J-series array systems.  Once the arrays were in the air, SoundLab kicked off. One of the coolest parts of the week for me was having the opportunity to mix 4 live bands, with Jim van Bergen (JVB) and Buford Jones looking over our shoulders.  It's really not every day you get to mix music with incredible minds like those two gentlemen giving you tips and tricks.  A special thanks to Erik Alberg, Eileen Smitheimer, and our own Mike Hooker and Vinnie Olivieri for putting these opportunities together.

Josh and Buford Jones working on their mix

For the second half of the week, we packed up the d&b rig, and flew the brand new Meyer Lyon arrays.  WOW!  All of us agreed that it was a contender for the best speaker we've ever heard - flat frequency and phase response, and almost no distortion or breakup, even well above 100dB!

Lyon going up

The whole week was filled with other awesome sound stuff, including a memorable slideshow to celebrate Bob McCarthy's distinguished achievement award, JVB's microphone dressing clinic, and the opportunity to learn about some things we've never really gotten an opportunity to dig into before... like Out Board UK's TiMax!!  Duncan and Dave were especially gracious in showing us the ropes of their machine and chatting about some of their experiences installing it!

Of course, while you're in Texas, you can't pass up the barbecue, TexMex, Cajun food, the Stockyards, and the Dallas Theater Center (we were able to see DTC's production of The Fortress of Solitude - absolutely wonderful show!).  Thanks to everyone who made UCI Sound's journey to Fort Worth so educational, and a whole lot of fun!