Thursday, February 12, 2009

Audio Prof Makes Change by Making Do


Armed only with elbow grease, a Loews account, and a dearth of funds, Professor Robert Fair and his audio students have delivered vast improvements to the department’s mixing and mastering suite over the last few weeks.

AU has an audio program certified by Protools, the standard software for professional studios. However, the university leaves professors struggling to create facilities resembling what students will encounter in the professional world, said Fair. A lack of funding meant that Fair and his students had to come up with low cost ways to improve the suite, which is where students mix music recorded in the room next door.

“We’re the stepchild they keep in the basement,” said Fair of the audio program, which operates primarily out of a set of small basement rooms in McKinley. One of the major problems facing students is the poor acoustic quality of McKinley 6, the location of the suite.

The room design of the original suite was identical to the other rooms in the basement of McKinley- complete with linoleum floors and cinder-block walls. Fair said that the best audio is created in a room that minimizes echo and sound reverberations, the exact opposite effect as that created by the existing space.

“The sound quality was abysmal,” said junior Cameron Conway. Conway is among six students who have a class on sound mixing for which they use the studio. “And you really need good acoustics for that class. Mixing and mastering is about a third of what you can do with audio production, so you really need to have a good set up.”

Because of rules forbidding him from attaching anything to the walls, Fair and his students built a set of “gobos”- free standing units designed to absorb sound. The gobos are long sheets of plywood that Fair has covered with industry-quality sound panels that he pulled out of storage and burlap that he bought on sale over the internet.

The gobos are also portable, so that when the Audio Tech department moves from McKinley to Kreeger sometime in the next 18 months, the units can be easily carried.

Fair also bought inexpensive carpeting to cover the linoleum floors.

Another major problem with the facility was the lack of equipment. In an effort to give students more experience with studio-quality equipment, Fair pulled an old, broken equalizer out of storage (which he referred to as “the morgue”) and has been repairing it with materials brought from home or bought at Loews or on the internet.

In addition, Fair pulled a second set of speakers out of storage to allow students to hear how their work sounds on consumer speakers as opposed to professional quality.

“The first thing they’ll ask in a studio is, ‘what have you used?’” said Fair. “I want to create real world scenarios that’ll help students find jobs.”

Fair estimates that the room still needs about $7,000 worth of equipment to resemble a professional setting, which he says is necessary to make the most of the school’s existing professional equipment.

“We have a car but we have no tires,” said Fair of the school’s studio equipment. Fair said that the existing studio equipment is less effective in simulating a professional studio environment when combined with other out-of-date equipment and put into a building with such poor acoustic quality. He added that improvements to the equipment currently come largely from student lab fees.

Fair added that AU’s audio program could potentially become one of the best on the East Coast.

The program, which used to be part of the physics department and is now part of performing arts, is slated to move into a remodeled Kreeger in Fall of 2009, but Fair says he expects it to be closer to Fall of 2010, and that, in the meantime, the program needs funds for its existing equipment.

Fair’s update to the studio has already made a huge difference in the quality. The gobos reduce the amount of echo from that found in other rooms of the McKinley basement to levels much closer to that in a professional studio. Fair, who also works for organizations such as the Discovery channel outside of his work as a professor, said

The program, which was started in the late seventies, has seen a fifteen percent increase in enrollment each of the last two years.

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