A Whole New World: Audio

Tuesday's class marked my first exposure to (or even more accurately: consideration of) audio. Professor Beyer asked us to raise our hands if we had no experience with audio. My hand went up along with only a couple of other brave souls - the class, it seems, is predominately musicians and/or Music Tech students.

A dynamic microphone was passed to me in a bag. What do you see?, he asked. What kind of cord plugs into this? I waited for a classmate to volunteer the answer, and one did. This mic uses an XLR cord. Then the mixers came out.

Meet the audio mixer. This isn't even half of it.

We briskly moved through the "basics" - where inputs and outputs live, what the heck those fancy dials do, and we learned about something called the 'master mix.' What I took away from all of the demonstration was that there are a lot of things you can accomplish with a mixer, and a lot of different places to direct the sound. One can send a unique mix to someone's headphones on stage and a different mix to the audience. This can be useful if an instrumentalist wants to hear what everyone else is doing, and hear less of their own sound.

There are also several stereo hookups in the classroom. One can direct sound to the speakers in the floorboards versus the speakers in the credenza on the side of the room or to a third location. A fancy touchpad allows one to easily make these selections.

Michelle and Garvin speak to each other over microphones and we play with the mixer controls until we can hear them speak to each other. We learn about feedback, and about wireless microphones like the one Professor Beyer is wearing. We are impressed upon to set all controls to neutral before we even approach creating an audio setup - this is the only way we'll be able to effectively troubleshoot if problems arise.

After lots of experimenting and poking around I, embarrassed, bleat "What does 'EQ' mean?" My audiophile classmates must think I'm crazy.

Before next week's class we are asked to envision possible audiovisual setups for our performance in class on October 25th. We'll be using multiple computers, projectors, audio and visual mixers. The professors suggest that we take a look at JackTrip and UltraVideo (anyone able to find this one?). There is also a software on computers on the Steinhardt building's 8th floor, whose name I didn't quite catch.

Last Week at This Time

Dear collaborators, friends, and browsers, allow me to take you on a photo journey of last week's class.

I arrived feeling fairly nervous, having missed the second class of the semester the week before to dance for a week on a farm in Pennsylvania with SINecdoche Dance. I'm not a tech-savvy person, and I knew that I'd missed some crucial instruction on how to wrap cables, set up tripods, and other tasks central to our work.

Little did I know that we'd be asked to rig up 6 cameras on tripods connected to two video mixers connected to two computers connected to two projectors....and have these two computers speak to each other while projecting on multiple walls in the room. Our professor looked to us expectantly, provided only the necessary instructions, and left us to our own devices to figure out the mechanics.

Being rather inexperienced (and totally overwhelmed by the request), I stuck myself to a couple of poor, unsuspecting Music Tech students who slung phrases like "pass me the BNC cable" and "I'll grab the S-video" with ease. The best part of the experience, hands down, came when I was escorted up to the 8th floor of the building, where important-looking connector cables live neatly in an impressive closet of totally intimidating techno-scramble.

At the end of the day, it looked something like this:

Although there is no way I could re-create (or help re-create) this setup at this point in my understanding, I did learn about analogue and digital and how they speak to each other (or don't). By the end of class we had just enough time to witness the delay between the video and sound, and wonder aloud about possible solutions.