With only elbow grease, a Lowe's account and a dearth of funds, College of Arts and Sciences professor Robert Fair and his audio students have delivered vast improvements to the Audio Technology 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. The university leaves professors struggling to create facilities resembling what students will encounter in the professional world, Fair said. 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, he said.
"We're the stepchild they keep in the basement," Fair said about the audio program, which operates primarily out of a set of basement rooms in the McKinley Building.
The program, which used to be part of the physics department and is now part of performing arts, is slated to move into the remodeled Kreeger Building in the fall, but Fair said he expects it to be closer to the fall of 2010. In the meantime, the program needs funds for its existing equipment.
One of the major problems students face is the poor acoustic quality of McKinley 6 - the location of the suite, Fair said.
The room design of the original suite was identical to the other rooms in the basement of McKinley - complete with linoleum floors and cinderblock walls. The best audio is created in a room that minimizes echo and sound reverberations, the exact opposite effect of that created by the existing space, Fair said.
"The sound quality was abysmal," said Cameron Conway, a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. 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 setup."
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, according to Fair. Kreeger is currently going through the process of asbestos removal and other repairs, according to a Jan. 29 statement from the Office of the University Architect.
Another major problem with the facility was the lack of equipment, according to Fair. 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 and bought at Lowe's or online.
In addition, Fair said he 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?'" he said. "I want to create real world scenarios that'll help students find jobs."
Fair estimated that the room still needs about $7,000 worth of equipment to resemble a professional setting, which he said is necessary to make the most of the school's existing professional equipment.
"We have a car but we have no tires," he said.
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 said. Improvements to the equipment currently come largely from student lab fees.
AU's audio program could potentially become one of the best on the East Coast, Fair said.
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