UCI to host Smaart 7 training session 9/18-9/20

The Sound Design program is hosting a professional training class from Rational Acoustics - the makers of the Smaart acoustic analysis software. The classes will be held September 18-20. Please contact Rational Acoustics for more information or click here for more info:

http://www.rationalacoustics.com/files/RA_Class_Flyer_-_Sept_18-20_2012_Irvine.pdf

Push The Button and an Award!

Yesterday, after a long half-week of exhaustion and many months of planning, the USITT conference wrapped up in Long Beach, CA.  This year, in addition to helping to plan parts of the conference, I also chaired a panel on intermediate/advanced applications of multi-channel audio.  Brad Berridge and Davin Huston worked with me as a group called Push The Button, and director/dancer/artist Maya Gurantz helped out as well.  We created two new dance pieces, one of which used data from two wii remotes to control the sound, and the other of which used an xBox kinect to control the sound. The dance pieces were accompanied by a short lecture about some of the techniques used to harness the sound delivery system of the room. The presentation went well, I thought. A little short, with a few bugs, but overall, a nice start down a new path of research.

In other news, my recent design for Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park's production of Tigers Be Still won a League of Cincinnati Theatres Award for outstanding sound design. You can read about it here!

This week has been exhausting. I'm taking today off. Mostly.

USITT 2012 SoundLab

SoundLab is complete! All speakers and mics are hung. The surround listening area is up. SIM zone is there. Qlab & D-mitri too. And Shure way in the back! It's pretty sweet! Great job to everyone who helped plan it, and install it. Let the fun begin! Welcome to USITT 2012 Long Beach!

Here is a link to a PhotoSynth I took of the whole room. A 180º view of things. Front is the presenters tables. To the left is the surround sound zone with TiMax. Back Left is a D-Mitri and Qlab stations. Back Right/Center is the Shure Wireless mics. Back foreground are the digital mixers, and in the corner back right is the SIM station. Lots of toys to play with!

http://photosynth.net/view/0efbb69a-2ce3-4831-9e3e-90eca9fcbe1a

Shenanigans!

Well, in the spirit of the upcoming USITT conference in Long Beach, I thought it would be a good time to show a little bit of what we do here at UCI.

A few months ago we moved into our new studio, the Meyer Sound Design Studio.

The MSDS has become a home away from home. But a lot of hard work went into putting it together.

Some of the time is was all fun and games.

Sometimes, it took a lot of concentration....

But we can't spend all of our time in the studio. Right down the hall, we have a wonderful office space for all of the Drama Design students. DesignLand is a great place for concentrating, and for working with our peers. Everyone is in one large room, and we are surrounded by art, literature and big ideas all the time.

But of course, we need to blow off steam, or just chat.

And it's where us Soundies get together and play.

But we also get off campus when we can. Most if the time, it involves food.... lots of food.

But when we do get out, we enjoy the sunshine : )

It's not all fun and games at UCI. We tune plenty of systems.

Tuning is rough, sometimes you just have to take a break, and feel the music (or... bass).


And tuning is a very serious business.

But don't worry, Matt will always find the sweet spot....

And when the day is done, we still know how to clean up well.

Can't wait for the conference to start! See you all soon!

-beth

'I learned that in Sound Design School...'

dig it:




- via Laughing Squid

Cool use for a contact mic...

The creator this project, Bruno Zamborlin, put contact mics on various surfaces to detect different timbres of finger movements, and converted the signal into a trigger for a variety of sample sounds. Very cool!

The Cyber Conductor

Stumbled across this awesome performance art piece. If only the Cyber Conductor had MIDI in...!





For more about Aleksey Igudesman:
http://www.alekseyigudesman.com/

The Sound of Noise

Josh found this by accident:

http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/magnolia/soundofnoise/

Watch the trailer and I'm sure you'll agree it could very well be the sound design, editorial and composing feat of the century. I can't wait!

-Mike

Invisiball

If sports were like this when I was a kid, I might've been a jock.

Some Swedish geniuses have come up with a ball game that you play without a ball and without sight.  With only SOUND.  Check it out:




"To Completely Trust Your Ears Makes You a Good Player"

(via Create Digital Music)

Nighttime Recording of the [Haunted??] Claire Trevor Theater

Over the past month, I have had the pleasure of spending many hours in the Claire Trevor Theater, including four all-night designfests during tech for The Merchant of Venice. Amidst my near-hallucinatory exhaustion, I became very aware (or perhaps convinced myself) that the CTT comes to life at night—at least sonically. One notable “feature”, which actually plagued a couple of the dress rehearsals for Merchant, is the air pressure difference between the inside of the theater and the outdoors. When the correct combination of entrance doors are left open, the air travels very quickly through the doors and creates and eerie humming sound. It's somewhat similar to the use of wind whistling through open doors in David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo movie, but on a larger scale. 

So I got to thinking that someone ought to record Claire’s diverse sound palette and expansive reverberant space. I got my trusty Sound Devices 702 and a couple of mics and headed in at 11:30 PM on one night. I recorded everything I could get my hands on for about 3 hours: the enormous loading bay door, the incredible booming bass of the concrete stairwell to the catwalks, a chainlink fence of a gear cage, and all sorts of activity in the catwalks including footsteps and various bangs.

Ironically, I was unfortunately unable to capture the air pressure difference sound — I was pretty tired by 2:30AM and I couldn't figure out what combination of doors to open... Bucket list!

I've uploaded a COMPILATION of the recordings that I edited together quickly (I have the full set of edited effects available upon request).

Enjoy the spookies!
Matt Glenn

MERGE

Flood, the group of Long Beach modern-art-impresarios behind SoundWalk, have just announced Merge, an urban art installation set to open in Long Beach on 31 March.  The approach is slightly different than SoundWalk in that Merge will be diversifying the curation across area business owners and homeowners and that the artwork will be broader in scope than just sound art.

If you're going to be at the USITT conference in Long Beach this March, you'll be in town to check out Merge!  Come on down!

Eat Your Heart out, Michael Winslow

Apparently, seals make terrific sci-fi sound effects.

Bonus points if you know, without researching, who Michael Winslow is.

All Alan Lomax field recordings streaming online from March

Sound Designers take note: this is research paydirt!

The Wire is reporting that in March, all of Alan Lomax's recordings are going to be available, in their entirety, for free, right here.  Currently, the recordings are only available in 45-second snippets.

I can't tell you how much Lomax has meant to me.  His work (both on his own and with his father) as an ethnomusicologist) has preserved old musical styles and re-ignited interest in their performance. His field recordings span time, place, and genre, and I've used them in research on many of my designs and scores. The newgrass movement, the resurgence in the folk movement, Moby's album play... they all owe a great deal to Lomax's recordings and scholarship. I can't wait for this collection to come available.

Wow!

DPA links

I came across some interesting links the other day while browsing the DPA site.

First is a great video on how to fit an e6 microphone:


And second, a nice guide on microphone basics (there is a downloadable pdf there too):
http://www.dpamicrophones.com/en/Mic-University/The-Essentials.aspx

The cool things you find when looking for other things.

A visit to Meyer Sound

On Monday, January 9, the entire sound design program visited the Meyer Sound Laboratories plant in Berkeley, CA. The tour was led by UCI Drama alum Todd Meier - who is the Digital Products Manager for Meyer. Everyone was blown away by the intense and thorough quality control and attention to detail. We've all known that their products sound great - but now everyone knows why.

L-to-R: Mac Johnson (Meyer), Mike Hooker, Matt Glenn, Jeff Polunas, Stephen Swift, Patricia Cardona, Josh Fehrmann, Beth Lake, BC Keller, Vincent Olivieri

The visit was preceded by two days of rampant debauchery on the other side of the bay -- winding up towards a great evening at an awesome bar with Ellen Juhlin, Michael Creason and Tom Cavnar from Meyer. I'll let everyone else choose what pics to share - lest I ruin any more reputations!

-Mike