A Sennheiser Seminar… Sennheiserminar?

Last week, we had the pleasure of hosting Daryl Nishymiya and Brian Walker of Sennheiser for a presentation on some audio and RF principals. We were joined by Jeff Polonus (Sound Design alum 2012) and team sound from Cal Sate Fullerton as well as a few others. A fun and enlightening time was had by all. Thanks to BC, our sound supervisor, for setting up the presentation, and thanks to Brian for hanging out with us and answering questions after. We haven’t forgotten your offer to bring by a few racks full of wireless equipment and do a full scale tuning with us ;)

Ben

New Facebook Home

We were recently encouraged to start a Facebook "fan" page for the UCI Sound Design program. We will certainly still be updating this blog (and we're working on posting some new photos to the website), but if you're interested in following our happenings, give us a like!

https://www.facebook.com/ucisound

The Further Adventures of 255 2015: TechMDi

After our trip to JBL/Harman, we switch gears completely for our next class adventure. We again braved the 405 North at rush hour, but this time to Burbank; A land that is covered in sprawling studios of every discipline, full of artists and technicians at the top of their respective games, none of whom can talk very much about their current projects because they are up to their eyeballs in non-disclosure agreements.

Fortunately, it turns out we know a guy!

Joe Wilbur, a 2010 graduate of our program was nice enough to take us around the digs at TechMDi. They are a company that designed, builds, and installs audio, video, and show control systems and wrappers for many applications, but they work primarily in themes entertainment. Among many other clients, they are one of Walt Disney Imagineering’s go-to houses when they need someone to make all the pieces fit and end-user operable! Find out more about them at their website.

Joe brought us in through the “Design Bullpen;” and we were met warmly by Dave Revel, the President of TechMDi, and Kei, the shop dog and mascot, who went from skepticism to bringing us tennis balls in just moments. We passed a number of offices (including that of Tim Brown, UCI Sound Design MFA 2011, who was out of the country at a job site) on our way back to their shop spaces, the larger of which is an open floor where they lay out and build racks, and the smaller of which is where they produce UL compliant faceplates for all of their operator panels. It was cool to see some of the system diagrams and how they compare to how we tend to think of line diagrams in theater. Line diagrams make sense for us because our systems generally only need to move signal in one direction, but a non-linear approach needs to be taken when coordinating multiple playback types across multiple zones.

Joe does a great deal of system programming for TMDi, and one of the major platforms that they currently use is one that we don’t have our hands on at UCI: QSys. Joe took us through some really basic steps in QSys designer as we sat around the big conference table. He stepped us through the way that TMDi goes about organizing multi-zone systems, in order to help parse through the tremendous number of control points throughout the varying programs that they use. He also set up a simple system from scratch in order to demonstrate some of the more straightforward functions available. He also gave us doughnuts, which is of equal importance.

So thank you Joe, Dave, and the rest of the team at TMDi for hosting us! I’m sure you’ll see some of us again in the future.

- Ben

Field Trip to Harman/JBL

One of the best parts about coming back to school is our first quarter Trends in Modern Sound Design class.  This class (apart from being home to some of our favorite recurring projects... stay tuned) is often a great time for us to visit some really awesome places where sound trends are being made! In the past, we've visited Warner Brothers, L'Acoustics, QSC, and more!  This week, we woke up early and headed to Harman for a tour of their engineering and testing facilities.

We learned about compression driver technology, and JBL's take on how to make the drivers more efficient, with lower distortion.  Then we took a look at the testing facilities, where JBL was going through their notorious, rigorous 100-hour power test.  The room (behind 3 doors) required ear protection, because the SPL from their power test was incredible (it clipped the microphone on the crude SPL meters on our phones)!

The photo below is us in the power test room with Henry Goldansky, Director of Engineering for JBL.

After a peek in the anechoic chambers (they have 4 of them!), we heard a great lecture from Dr. Sean Olive about subjective listening research.  We were honored to be featured on his slides as the "most trained" student ears. (Thanks Mike for your critical listening class!)  The slide below was one of my favorites -- it shows a correlation between training and cynicism.

Chart from Harman Innovation Hub

Following the lecture, we were invited into the subjective listening room, where a hydraulic speaker mover hides behind a black grill cloth, and Harman's proprietary iPad app allowed us to choose our speaker preferences.  The speaker mover was a brilliant solution to ensure that each speaker was placed in the exact same place.  Interestingly, our preferences were all pretty similar to each other, and we were surprised with how accurately we could distinguish between the different bookshelf speakers in a blind test.  It became apparent that each of the speakers really did have a character of its own.

Photo from Dr. Sean Olive on Twitter

Thank you very much to our hosts at Harman/JBL: Paul Chavez, Ken Freeman, Henry Goldansky, and Dr. Sean Olive. We had a great time and learned a lot about subjective and objective testing!

My fellow students also wrote a quick note on their experience, after the jump.

--Matt Eckstein

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!