Meyer Constellation Tuning

Intrepid MFA student Patricia Cardona wanted, for her design for Waiting for Godot, to use the Meyer Constellation system that we own here at UCI. The Constellation system uses VRAS (Variable Room Acoustic Simulation) technology to alter the acoustic properties of a room. UCI owns a portable system, and it gets used in a few shows per year. The last time we had any Constellation/VRAS training, however, was before any of our current students were here at UCI, so it was time to ask Meyer to provide some training. Fortunately, Mac Johnson at Meyer was excited to come down with some colleagues to help us learn how to take advantage of the Constellation system.

The Meyer visit lasted over three days. On Sunday, Mac and Pierre Germain came in to do some secret math to make the room sound natural. Patricia, Stephen, BC, and I were on-hand to help them out, but due to the proprietary nature of the techniques, we weren't allowed to be in the room to watch the magic happen.

On Monday, we took a break from work on Waiting for Godot, but Mac visited my Trends in Modern Sound Design class to talk about his life before and after his being hired by Meyer. Mac regaled us with tales of the road and more than a few words of wisdom about high standards, interpersonal communication, and professional flexibility/adaptability. On Monday night, we met for libation and mirth.


Tuesday morning, bright and early, we met back at the Robert Cohen Theater to get cracking on giving the Constellation System some personality. Pierre had done a terrific job of making the room sound natural, and now we welcomed Steve Ellison, who gave a primer in the parameters and power of the Constellation System. Steve walked us through the interface and helped Patricia create a few presets to get her started as she heads into tech this weekend.

Here's Steve and Mac on the set of Waiting for Godot:
And Steve with some of our MFA students, probably rapt with attention as Mac activated the room with his mellifluous baritone voice.

It was an exceptional session! I've used VRAS a few times in my work over the past few years, but I feel like I understand it now at a level that I had not been able to understand before. I can't wait to try using it again soon, and I know that many of the students feel the same way!

Monday Margaritas (and special guests!)

You've probably read about it already on this blog, but every Monday we all get together to celebrate anything and everything. This week we were honored to have Mac Johnson (Education Program Coordinator for Meyer Sound) join us! And... alum Joe Wilbur also dropped by. This picture was taken before things disintegrated... but we won't discuss that here ;)

In face order from left to right: Josh Fehrmann (MFA1), Sinan Zafar (BFA4), Joe Wilbur (alum), Vinnie Olivieri (legendary), Mac Johnson (Meyer), Matt Glenn (MFA1), Beth Lake (MFA3), Jeff Polunas (MFA3), Stephen Swift (MFA2), Patricia Cardona (MFA2), BC Keller (sound supervisor)

Darron West drops by

Last week, Broadway sound designer Darron West came by to talk to Vinnie's Trends in Modern Sound Design class. Darron is back on Broadway this week in tech for David Henry Hwang's Chinglish - opening soon at the Longacre Theatre.

Thank you science!

A 29-year old woman hears her own voice for the first time:

A baby hears his mother's voice for the first time (thanks to cochlear implants):

The world keeps getting cooler.

T.E.D. on Sound

Hey folks,
A couple short videos from the folks at T.E.D. on sound:
Four Ways that Sound affects us
and
Shh! Sound health in 8 steps

Some interesting things to think about that might help you somewhere down the road.



(here are the links, in case the embedded ones above don't work)
http://www.ted.com/talks/julian_treasure_the_4_ways_sound_affects_us.html

http://www.ted.com/talks/julian_treasure_shh_sound_health_in_8_steps.html

Prop Phone!

(crossposted from my personal blog)

(I don't usually post twice in one day, but this is a bit of a big deal.)

It's tough to fake a mobile phone on stage.

In the old days of wired phones, there were some great options. Tele-Q boxes worked well, as did specials/recordings and hiding bells in secret places. Mobile phones, on the other hand, are much trickier. The tele-q option doesn't work, because there is no base station. Hiding specials doesn't work very well either, because people carry their phones with them, making the sourcing very tough. Plus, if you want get picky, the sound of a phone ringing varies dramatically as you pull the phone out of your pocket, purse, etc. That's a complex change that is tough to replicate.

I'm happy to announce that a friend (and former student) of mine has written an iPhone/iPad/iPod app called PropPhone that lets you use one iDevice to control the play/pause of audio on another iDevice. You can use the 'controller' device to send those triggers to the 'prop' device, and as you do it, the 'prop' device will change screen images to replicate an incoming phone.

Not only can you use it for phone rings, but if you attach it to a battery-powered loudspeaker, you have a very cheap wireless special (not including the cost of the iDevice, of course).

Here are some other things to note:

• The audio does NOT stream from one device to another. The audio files themselves live on the 'prop' device. This cuts way down on lag.
• Currently, you can only choose the sound file from the 'prop' phone, not from the 'controller' phone.
• This is the very first version of the app, so expect big changes to happen as the developer gets feedback.

This is a great thing for our industry - something that we've been trying to solve for a long long time. I'm looking forward to using it soon in production! $2.99 well-spent!

The Whole World Blind: recording session

Yesterday, I spent much of the day at an un-named art museum in LA, recording sound for The Whole World Blind, a sound-art piece I'm working on with Roxanne Varzi, an anthropologist here at UCI. The piece is about removing the visual stimulation of war photography. Instead of viewing a photograph and hearing a curator talk about it, we've removed the photograph entirely. Instead, the audience will be blindfolded and just hear the curation. No visuals - only audio.

Of course, this creates a great opportunity for sound design, but neither Roxanne nor I wanted to get super heavy-handed. Instead, we're taking a fairly restrained approach. For each of the ten photographs the curator describes, we've created a design that uses the sounds typical to a museum to create a psychologically-underscoring design. Maybe a cellphone interrupts the curator's speech about focus. Footsteps on an outdoor path echo the cobblestones in another photograph. Nothing big and dramatic, but lots of small elements designed to support the images (which we never see).

To make these recordings, we set up a binaural microphone system at the museum and staged the events of each photograph individually. A number of current and former students (including first-year sound designer Matt Glenn and second-year sound designer Stephen Swift) came out to help us with the session. Each scene was precisely planned out, with performers walking, dialing, photographing, talking, sniffling, coughing, etc. all on cue. Here's a shot of me talking everyone through the staging of the next scene.

Towards the end of the day, Roxanne and I sit down to talk through the last few scenes. Matt hangs out nearby, with his bag of shoes just out of camera shot.

The Whole World Blind will premiere at SoundWalk on 1 October 2011. If you're in the socal area, come check it out. It will also be presented in Berlin in mid-December.

IATSE local USA-829 to represent sound designers on B'way

After a long series of discussions between Local-1, USA 829 and the Broadway League, an agreement has just been reached where 829 is now officially recognized as the sound design representative on Broadway. Having recently been through a Broadway show without representation by my union (as has Vinnie, too) I can tell you that this is long overdue. The next steps involve creating and ratifying a contract in writing. We are one huge step closer!

-Mike

how hummingbirds got their name

Given that I am dive-bombed weekly when changing the feeder in my yard, I am thoroughly convinced that hummingbirds are the most bad-ass bird, ounce-for-ounce, on the planet. It now turns out that they also have a sound design skill using their tail feathers as reeds. Apparently their name comes from this skill and not the humming of their wings. Check this out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPaVjhUsdAw&feature=player_embedded

Maybe it's a tiny avian crush that I experience each week and not a death threat!

-Mike

Opening night!

Hey guys,

I am currently assisting on a show at the Geffen Playhouse which opens tomorrow night. It's an awesome show with a great design team, and a fantastic cast! If you get a chance, I highly recommend seeing it!

Here is a link!

Come see it!

seven habits of highly effective sound people

Here is a link to an article in ProSoundWeb that I thought interesting, and some real good, basic advice.

Short answers are:
1. Excellent Organization
2. Continuous Learning
3. Good Attitude
4. Mentoring
5. People Skills
6. Technical Skills
7. Listening

But the details are what makes it a good article. Go read for yourself!

Push The Button @ SoundWalk

Push The Button, one of my projects (this one with Davin Huston (of Purdue U.) and Brad Berridge (of Williams College)) has a piece of sound art in this year's SoundWalk, a sound-art-festival in Long Beach, CA. Huston, Berridge, and I are going to install a piece called City Park, which had its premiere at the Prague Quadrennial in June.

I'm sure that ALL of the sound designers at UCI are looking forward to the event!

There's a bunch of great artists participating this year, and FLOOD, the organizers, made this promo video. Check it out!

The UK Association of Sound Designers

Our peers across the pond have just created a brilliant collective. The Association of Sound Designers is a new professional association that represents the combined interests of sound designers - professional and student - from across the UK.

http://www.associationofsounddesigners.com/

It's not a union and not the technical standards police... rather it looks like a group of people who care and wish to connect. I wish them the best of luck... and I hope something like this will brew soon in our great land, too.

Cheers to all of you in the UK!

Theaterworks: The Understudy

I'm wrapping up a week-and-a-half residency in Hartford CT, where I've been working on TheaterWorks's production of Theresa Rebeck's The Understudy. The play is a terrific piece about a put-in rehearsal for an understudy on a Broadway production of a long lost Kafka play. The piece takes place in real time, and there are only three characters (the understudy, the stage manager, and the movie star). Theresa Rebeck is a talented writer (I've designed the premiere of a couple of her shows), and I find her work to be smart, slick, and terrifically funny. This play is certainly all of those things.

As the understudy rehearsal progresses, the characters move back and forth between rehearsing scenes from the Kafka play and conversations about the play (and each other - there's no shortage of interpersonal drama). As we move in and out of the scenes, there are lighting and sound cues to help guide us. Additionally, there is a fourth character, an unseen woman named Laura who controls lights, sound, and deck automation. She's having a bad day and can't seem to keep up with what scene she should be in. As such, she is continually triggering the wrong cues, leaving the actors to rehearse out of order, on incomplete sets, etc.

The biggest challenge of the play for me was to use the 'sound design' of the Kafka play to help support Rebeck's play. When we play a sound cue, it needs to not only fit the world of Kafka (which can be indelicately summarized as dark and brooding), but it also needs to fit this quirky comedy that Rebeck wrote. The design, in effect, needs to be both dark, brooding, and comedic.

I approached this challenge in a few ways. The first was to seek out music for the design that was 'Kafka' in tone but 'Rebeck' in rhythm. For example, one big sound moment features a huge string orchestra piece. The orchestra plays a four-phrase piece, and each phrase has a pregnant pause between it. The music itself is dark and huge, but the gaps between the gesture allow the actors to try to speak over the music. Each time a music gesture ends, the characters start talking. Then, they get interrupted by another music gesture. We create the idea that the characters are trying their best to work, but are overwhelmed by the unstoppable machinery of the technology.

Another way we addressed this challenge was to give the automation a personality. Much of the automation of the 'Kafka' play is actually executed manually by the theater staff, and on the first day of tech rehearsals, we discovered that the manual machinery was actually too quiet. There's something about the sound of automated machinery (a low drone/hum) that helps to underscore the ceaselessness of the world, so on the first day of tech, we decided to try adding in a bit of automation hum whenever the machinery moved. It worked really well - the machinery ended up having a more threatening personality, which worked really well in the play. As the play progressed, the sound of the machinery increases slightly, to underscore the characters' exasperation with Laura and her poor performance.

(as a side note, I should point out that the machinery sound idea wasn't mine - it initially came from the set designer, Luke Hegel-Cantarella, who heads the scenic design program here at UCI. Go go go collaboration!)

There were a couple of other interesting details of this production that I enjoyed. There's a section where the stage manager goes backstage and talks to the cast over a voice-of-god mic. The woman playing the stage manager is a trained singer with a lot of microphone experience, but we asked her to act as if she had very poor experience. She moved towards and far from the mic, making her volume fluctuate. She sighed deeply into the mic, causing a 'whoosh' of air to rush over the diaphragm, which sounds nasty. On the technical end, I boosted her low end (har har har) to make her sound more boomy, and I kept her volume pretty loud to be a bit overwhelming. It made for a great moment in the play.

If you're in Hartford, check this play out! It runs until mid-September.

Last night, after the Sunday preview, I drove down to New London and the O'Neill Festival to see a friend, fellow sound designer Brad Berridge. Brad is currently in residence at the O'Neill for their Cabaret Series, and last night he mixed an incredible event featuring a number of stunning performers: Joel Silberman, Euan Morton, Allan Harris, Amanda McBroom, Andre DeShields, Gretchen Reinhagen, and Lillian Montevecchi. As any of our students will gladly tell you, I am not a huge music theatre fan, but this was a truly special night. All of the performances were terrific (Amanda McBroom's 'Baby' was a stunner, Euan Morton's Whitney Houston cover brought the house down and Joel Silberman's musicianship was masterful), but for me, the highlight was Andre DeShields. That. Man. Can. Sing.

(watch that last clip about 2 minutes in - The Viper's been in my head all day long)

Well, it LOOKS finished...

Some progress pics of the new studio. Nothing is wired up yet but it's starting to look like a studio...

And the edit suite...