Keynote Address for the 2006 AES Conference
By Robert Scovill
Esteemed colleagues and friends welcome to the 2006 AES conference. I’d like to a moment and thank the AES Committee for inviting me to speak to you today — I’m filled with a lot of pride and humility in being asked to join you here today and speak on the topic of live sound, a profession that at times seems to be as much art as it is science but it’s one that I’ve spent the greater part my adult life feebly trying to master.
Ya know, as I was starting to assemble this speech I started taking stock of just how ingrained sound reinforcement has become in our world and where we might be with out it. Aside from the obvious, meaning no more Madonna concerts, think of these examples, — no culture defining concerts period, no Woodstocks, no Live Aids, — no player introductions, national anthems or “take me out to the ball game” at sporting events, the piercing sound of “we’re currently at 30,000 feet” awakening us from a deep sleep, no big political rallies with tyrants and politicians spewing rhetoric, and… no Karaoke?!
Wait — that’s actually starting to sound pretty good…
I mean consider the challenges for the soft spoken leader of the religious world, the pope and how while only addressing a handful of people his meaning might get lost in it’s inability to reach all of the straining ears in the crowd.
This world without sound reinforcement makes me think of the scene from the Monty Python movie Life of Brian. As you might remember in the movie, someone is preaching the “Blessed are the meek” message from the top of a remote hill and the people who are very far away are straining to hear him and saying things like “Blessed are the cheese makers? Now, why would he bless them?”
So you see, sound reinforcement — really good sound reinforcement is necessary to ensure salvation for us all, not just the cheese makers.
Okay seriously though, I feel that no one area has showcased all the benefits or indeed had a bigger impact on the development of products and methods in live sound than that of the concert sound industry. The concert industry really is the heart and soul the music business because it is THE great proving ground for both the audio professional and the musician. Indeed what started out as a cottage industry of equipment providers and specialists has now blossomed into a billion dollar industry that shares influence with all disciplines of professional audio. Ever since the first guitar player plugged in an electric guitar, or a singer stood in front of an ensemble that would be performing for an audience bigger than a small night club, sound reinforcement has had to be reckoned with.
Ironically though, live sound in general and in particular sound reinforcement as a science and a skill has generally lived a life of obscurity. It has long survived as the red headed step child of professional audio and has certainly spent its share of time in the shadow of what many consider its much sexier and wiser big brother — the recording industry.
But in today’s recording world, one that seems to thrive on capturing minute slices of time and then pasting them all together to simulate “a captured moment” allows very few people who are not live sound mixers to ever experience the true “something”… the “moment” that live mixers get to experience when they’re working with a great ensemble. The recording engineers of past eras all had one thing in common with the sound reinforcement mixers of today, or any era for that matter, and that is that they all implicitly understand that great sounding mixes, are actually born of great performers using great and interesting sounding instruments and in turn giving great performances. — No music actors miming over pre recorded tracks — “The moment” happens on the night when everything is clicking, you’re blessed with a strong marriage of room and PA system, there’s a musical communication happening between the musicians, you as the mixer are in tune with everything that is happening both musically and technically and in turn make your moves based on anticipation as opposed to reaction and then finally the crowd is the fuel for the fire. I defy anyone in this room to find another medium that can replace a great live performance. Those “moments” are rare to be sure, but if you ever experience it once, it’s instantly clear that 5.1 DVDs in a well tuned living room will never do it for you.
I feel very fortunate to have watched, and been a part of concert sound reinforcement for more than 25 years or so and to see it morph into a very specialized science. To be considered exceptional at it requires expertise in a broad range of disciplines including acoustic sciences, speaker sciences, music technology and theory and most importantly the skill to listen, listen amidst total chaos, and as you and I are well aware, listening is indeed a skill.
Today’s concert sound world has bread an entire culture of specialists. Today it’s common place to have crew members that are speaker system specialists, flying and rigging specialist, power specialist and even crew members specializing in handling pre recorded or post recorded audio. All these skilled positions are required to work in harmony with the guy who actually mixes the event.
Probably the best example of this, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed it over the past few years, but speaker system implementation on touring sound systems has become a very specialized job. Some of my colleagues have aptly named these guys “Line Array Jedi Knights”.
Long gone are the days of a messy haired, probably slightly hung over roadie, wearily shuffling into an empty concert hall, gazing upwards to the empty seats and then turning to a bunch of burly guys and proclaiming — “yep, same stack as yesterday!”
In the past ten years we have witnessed something very uncommon in the history of sound reinforcement — an almost universal paradigm shift in speaker system topology and there is no denying the profound effect it has had on our industry. The acceptance of line source arrays truly marked a moment in time for sound reinforcement. What was initially dismissed by many “traditionalist” as the “flavor of the month” was noticeably trumped by a couple influential groups of people.
First and foremost the actual mixers who used these systems, and secondly and perhaps most importantly, a group of people with no audio acumen other than that they were listeners — the fans. I can remember experiencing this on many levels in the earlier days of trying out line array systems on tour. It was actually thrilling to experience it. Listeners with no agenda, meaning they weren’t budding sound guys, or musicians who would base their opinion strictly on the guitar sound or the drum sound — no agenda what so ever other than their ability to listen as a fan, stood up and took notice. Media critics and writers were making mention of it. Even promoters, but more importantly fans were coming up after the show with this strange look in their eyes — not just because it was a Tom Petty show either — and they would say things like “Okay — I don’t pretend to know anything about sound — but I just gotta ask, what’s the deal — why did that sound SO much better than all the other concerts I’ve seen here? I mean, I could actually understand what the guy was saying” So you see, today —“blessed are more than the cheese makers”. Believe me, there’s job security to go around with those kinds of sentiments floating around.
At a recent tradeshow overseas, I was positively dumbfounded by the shear quantity of companies offering line source topologies. As I stood their, it hit me that this was not a simple trend reinforced by a few select users — after a what, in retrospect, seems like a short period of time, this was clearly as a result of the demands by the mixers and most importantly the listeners. In this rare case the manufacturing community, instead of driving the trend has actually responded to one. Love line array — hate line array — believe it is the right tool for the job — believe it’s totally the wrong tool for the job — there is no denying it, this was bona fide mandate.
I think it’s interesting to note, that one of the best “bi products” that line source arrays gave the concert sound industry though, is that of an actual “method”. Where as in the past, techniques were as varied as the personalities or the companies that endorsed them, today we actually appear to have a reason for doing things a specific way. If we compare today’s world with the time of our friend shouting “same stack as yesterday” we clearly see the “brave new world”. It’s now common place for technicians — note, they are no longer roadies — to enter a building in preparation for an event with a set of tools and skills previously unseen by this class of worker.
Today, — that same red eyed roadie now routinely rolls into an arena with a surveyor’s kit, inclinometers, laptops running advanced spreadsheets that assist him in making intensive calculations and predictions for the array he will install for the given seating geometry. He may even have wireless internet access in order to access larger server’s located offsite to help him accurately predict SPL distribution and coverage of his proposed array and finally FFT analysis to assist in tuning the system for the given building.
My friends, this IS the brave new world, all the great scientific minds have finally converged “Pythagoras, Fourier and the Line Array Jedi Knight” I mean today’s roadie is regularly using the cosine formula folks; these are heady times indeed for sound reinforcement.
In all seriousness though, this leads me to a topic that is very near and dear to my heart, and the legacy of AES has certainly shown that it’s near and dear to them as well; education.
From live sound’s earliest days — and all the way up to the late 80s or so, there were really very few, if any, formalized programs for teaching sound reinforcement and live audio techniques. Many people not unlike myself came from a recording or an electronics background or even jumped the fence from being a musician to an audio pro. In fact an entire culture of professionals was cultivated over a couple of generations that simply graduated from the school of hard knocks with no formalized education in audio.
In retrospect I feel very fortunate to have taken the good advice to attend a technical school where I studied toward a triple E in electronics and a minor in physics. Now granted, at that time there was not even a hint of audio application in this education, but it did give me a great advantage once I entered the field — the advantage of language. That along with the fact that I worked along side some of the greatest mentors I could imagine having. The technical language and a fair amount of practical understanding of wave mechanics and music training continue to be a very powerful set of tools for me.
But the landscape today is very different for people trying to get into professional audio and more specifically live sound. The shear amount of technology in which they are faced with as beginning students is staggering — But, what will never change is the need for understanding the most basic principles of audio — a class that is purely an elective in the school of hard knocks and it seems not many elected to take it. If over 25 years of mixing, and working side by side with either some of the great minds of our industry or the greenest audio student has taught me anything it is simply this, that no technology, no black box will ever be a substitute for basic audio knowledge and the ability to creatively apply it. If there is a great message for us to communicate to future audio professionals let’s simply start there.
I’m very pleased to tell you that in 2006 there are a number of highly proficient seminars available to the public as well as post secondary educational facilities offering highly specialized live audio programs. Colleges and universities have started programs with live sound as the focus. And most importantly in my opinion, many high profile sound for hire companies have begun to participate in, and offer intern programs in partnership with many of these educational facilities. I urge these schools and companies to continue to develop curriculums that are in line with the growth of our industry. I believe it vital, not only to the success of these future professionals, but in the best long term interest of our industry as a whole.
No market segment before us stands to gain as much from education and even internship programs than the Houses of Worship market. But as any of us who have visited and worked in that market surely know, churches present some of the most difficult challenges that we may face as audio professionals. Challenges that are amplified — no pun — by the generally accepted dysfunctional marriage of speaker systems and architectural design that currently exists in the churches and this marriage is in desperate need of some intense counseling because some fundamental changes to the way worship is presented is showing up on the doorsteps of these churches.
America in the year 2006 appears to have assumed the role of “ground zero” for lack of a better term for an emerging style contemporary worship in today’s churches. This style of worship makes extensive use of contemporary music production and media presentation techniques and in so doing puts considerably greater demands on the technical and more importantly acoustical requirements for worship setting.
The worship service in and of itself presents extremely unique challenges for live sound production and not all of them can be addressed with the approaches that are readily accepted in secular live music productions. Never has there been more of a need for live audio skills and technology to help shape and enhance “the moment” than during a worship service. For most churches the “moment” needs to happen every Saturday and twice on Sunday and frankly sound reinforcement needs to be the vehicle to enhance that moment, not detract from it.
In his highly touted book “Breakout Churches” Thom Rainer estimates that there are nearly 400,000 churches in the United States alone. Now I don’t mean to imply that all of these churches are on the scale of a Willow Creek, Saddleback, Joel Osteen Ministries etc. But regardless of congregation size, all of them, in the end, chase essentially the same goal. To spread the word. A wise bet would be that the vast majority of these churches, even if they do not buy into the emerging style of worship, would be well served by trained professionals and or volunteers properly implementing and operating some of today’s current sound reinforcement technology.
The recent appearances of contemporary Christian pop acts appearing regularly on MTV and VH1 is a bellwether folks, it’s coming — rest assured — contemporary Christian music stands to be a force to be reckoned with in both concert touring and recorded media sales.
The rest of the world is watching to see how this all shakes out in America. Churches modeled after this contemporary and technically adept style of worship are cropping up everywhere around the world and it stands to infuse a burst of energy into our industry — maybe unlike anything we have ever witnessed previously.
In the short term for sound reinforcement as a technology industry, it appears that the next great summit to traverse is that of the digital live sound console and all the integrated control that they can offer. This has to include, the race to develop a delivery backbone for digital audio, control and data transmission between all potential elements of a system. This will also include the move to integrated speaker, amplifier and speaker management systems. But once again sound reinforcement presents some specific challenges in this area; namely latency, ease of use and reliability in the demanding world of live sound. Manufacturers are currently in the midst of feverishly attempting to develop and define the digital interconnectivity backbone for large scale sound systems. On the sidelines users and systems integrators are anxiously waiting for it to all shake out.
If asked, most of these users and systems integrators would concur that this backbone, in its best case scenario, needs to be as ubiquitous as the microphone cable. The microphone cable at its core does not care what two systems it’s plugging into as long as the input and the output to which it attaches meets some very basic criteria. Now, I’m well aware that I’m completely over simplifying this challenge, but the fear among the users is that as manufacturers, we are currently building our selves into a corner by spending enormous amounts of financial and human resources to develop a backbone that extends no further than our own product line. This equates to essentially building islands instead of bridges and this is not the great promise of digital technology and in my opinion until we conquer this single issue, that promise and many others will never be fully realized.
In the long term for sound reinforcement I see a future of convergence of technologies and methods of many different styles of audio production. The first is already in play where we are currently witness to the merging of sound reinforcement and recording technologies. These lines have not only converged but have simply merged into one where recording technology and methods are now firmly entrenched into both Front of House and monitor positions via digital audio workstations. Plug Ins, once considered an exclusive product of the digital recording world are experiencing wide and rapid acceptance by live sound engineers.
The integration of this technology has served to actually challenge the traditional workflow of a typical sound reinforcement day with concepts such as Virtual Soundcheck and daily multi-track archiving of performances. It doesn’t take much imagination to believe that the Front of House position of the future, could easily serve as the hub for numerous aspects of performance media delivery and control.
From this position audio will not only be presented to the immediate audience but might be bundled with video and made available for transport in either mastered or multitrack form via global integrated networks to recording studios for archiving, sweetening or remixing, television studios for broadcast, artist or label websites for distribution to an awaiting audience and destinations we have yet to even dream of. My bet is that iTunes may already know where these destinations are.
One of my hopes is that in the not to distant future we might see a sound reinforcement console and a recording console separated by thousands of miles sharing audio inputs via a digital stream. I can see a time where the digital network could also provide high levels of interconnectivity and centralized control of audio, lighting and video systems for a live performance — especially for the installation, AV and houses of worship market. These are the concepts that only the promise of digital technology could possibly offer and it should serve as a wake up call to all manufacturers that unlike the rich and storied past of sound reinforcement where the game was hardware, as the late Christopher Bach was so eager to always remind me, the technology game of the future is clearly one of software. Hardware will simply be the frame on a software picture. The manufacturers that are poised to address software as a core manufacturing process will be well positioned and well served.
In closing, as you stroll the floor this weekend amidst the sea of technology, I encourage you again to ask yourself the one simple question — what would this show, the music business or even the world, would look like without the live sound component?
Love sound reinforcement or hate it — say it sounds great or that it always sounds bad — as the old saying goes, if you’re not part of the solution, you could be part of the problem. For the brave people who have chosen to step up and be a part of the solution I applaud you and I submit to you that sound reinforcement is now just coming of age and is currently THE emerging market where all audio disciplines may one day converge.
But at the end of the day, especially when it comes to live sound we all get judged by an end result not the size or dedication of our efforts. Technology new or old must always strive to serve the art that it is trying to deliver. Innovative technology can be a wonderful thing for users and our businesses, but we must always strive to ensure that they are enhancing the creative process not inhibiting it. As our good friend Bruce Swedien once so eloquently put it “no one ever went home humming the console”. The music — the melody — the message — these must always remain the masters that our products are built to serve.
Thank you very much for attending this morning and over the next few days — enjoy your time at AES.