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Intern with Sennheiser at AES NY 2018

Sennheiser & Neumann are seeking two members of SoundGirls to intern with the company during the 2018 AES NY show. Interns will need to be available from Oct. 16 – 19, 2018

Dates and Times

Responsibilities

AES NY takes place at Jacob K. Javits Convention Center

Payment will be a pair of Sennheiser headphones and microphone:HD280Pro and e835. You will also receive a letter of recommendation upon successful close of the show.

You’re also welcome to join Sennheiser for dinner each evening.

Please send a cover letter of why you would like to intern and a resume to soundgirls@soundgirls.org

 

Shadowing Opportunity w/ FOH Engineer Edgardo “Verta” Vertanessian

SoundGirls Members who are actively pursuing a career in Live Sound or Concert Production are invited to shadow FOH Engineer Edgardo “Verta” Vertanessian.

Verta is currently FOH Engineer for Vance Joy. Verta has over 22 years of experience having mixed and system teched for a wide range of musical genres in venues ranging from clubs to stadiums. FOH Engineer for Vance Joy, Juanes, Lil Wayne (ME) and more. He has been the system tech/crew chief on tours ranging from Taylor Swift, The Who, Rihanna, Jay Z – Kayne West and more.

The experience will focus on FOH Mixing. This is open to SoundGirls members ages 18 and over. There is one spot available for each show. Call times are TBD and members will most likely be invited to stay for the show (TBD).

Vance Joy – European Dates

Vance Joy – Australian Dates

Additional Dates

Please fill out this application and send a resume to soundgirls@soundgirls.org with Verta in the subject line. If you are selected to attend, information will be emailed to you.

 

Be Bold, Be You, & Be Proud

We are all amazing women; we do great things, experience amazing events, and live in wonderful ways. We are strong role models and have strong role models. We are moms, significant others, teachers, bosses, trendsetters, friends, and leaders.

All these traits are wonderful and amazing qualities that many people look up too. So then why do a lot of us as women self-deprecate? Why do we not accept compliments when they are well deserved, we don’t take ownership of our significant achievements, and we don’t lead without fear of being called a bitch. Part of it is some of our less progressive counterparts accelerating the way we feel, but I think this idea has been ingrained in us over centuries. We tell ourselves things that bring us down, and we allow others to talk or act that way to us as well. We feel the need to search for approval than to already know we are doing the right thing. We need to accept ourselves for all our strengths and weaknesses, but that does not require us to tear ourselves down. We have enough people that will do that for us. Since we are such magnificent women, it’s time for us to start changing this for ourselves.

Think about the last time you looked at a picture of yourself – did you look at it without thinking something negative about yourself or did you start picking it a part? Thinking or even saying out loud “I have ugly bags under my eyes,” “I didn’t stand right,” or “I look fat.” Maybe you didn’t even look at it because you already knew you looked terrible because you’ve told yourself that so many times you think it is true.  Society markets to us that we need to be skinnier, dress differently, act differently, and more. As a result, we do it to ourselves too. Society brings us down enough. We don’t need to do it to ourselves, and we definitely don’t need to do it to each other. We need to make sure our false opinions of ourselves don’t turn into our realities.

I think it’s time we challenge ourselves to reset the trend. I know so many strong women, yet this still seems to be engrained in us as those strong women also deal with these feelings and thoughts.  It’s time for a change, and it starts with us. Look at that picture and see your health, beauty, strength, and remember the moment in which the picture was taken. Remind yourself your leadership and direction is no different than your counterpart. You are not bitchy, you are confident, and are giving clear directions! You are a leader no different than anyone else. Stop getting stuck on that one decision or one thing that did not go according to your plan; instead, focus on everything that did! Let’s be the example that all women need and change the outlook for the next generation just like the generation before us has done in other ways.

Let’s look at that picture and say, I look great! That day was so fun! Let’s be bold, be you, & be proud for those before us, those after us, and most of all for yourself

 

Missed this Week’s Top Stories? Read our Quick Round-up!

It’s easy to miss the SoundGirls news and blogs, so we have put together a round-up of the blogs, articles, and news from the past week. You can keep up to date and read more at SoundGirls.org

August Feature Profile

Karol Urban – Sound and Storytelling

The Blogs

Performance Anxiety


SoundGirls News

https://soundgirls.org/event/mexico-city-more-music-more-women/?instance_id=1324

Seeking SoundGirls For Music Expo – Nashville

Career Paths in Film and Television Sound

https://soundgirls.org/event/bringing-the-audience-closer-soundgirls-at-plasa-2018/?instance_id=1321

Hearing Health Seminar

SoundGirls and SoundGym

Shadowing Opportunity w/Guit Tech Claire Murphy

Shadowing Opportunity w/ FOH Engineer Sean “Sully” Sullivan

Shadowing Opportunity w/ FOH Engineer Kevin Madigan

Shadowing Opportunity w/ ME Aaron Foye

https://soundgirls.org/event/bay-area-soundgirls-sept-meeting/?instance_id=1317

Round Up From the Internet

AES Membership Bursaries

The AES UK Section is working on the HeForShe campaign to address gender inequality within the audio industry and increase the representation of female and non-binary audio engineers.

As part of the campaign, we are pleased to announce that thanks to sponsorship from MathWorks we are able to provide 5 HeForShe Membership bursaries! 2 bursaries will be for students and 3 for early career professionals. The bursaries will cover the cost of the AES Membership. Applications are only open to female and non-binary applicants who have a connection to either Cambridge or Glasgow, such connection could be due to one of the cities being city of birth, or place of work, or where you completed a degree or are currently studying or maybe where you did a placement. The requirement for such connection is due to the fact that MathWorks has offices both in Cambridge and Glasgow and they wish to support the local communities.

Please send your application statement (max 400 words) to mariana.lopez@york.ac.uk explaining how the bursary will help your studies and future plans if you are a student and how it will help your career if you are an early career professional. Please make sure you explain what your connection to either Cambridge or Glasgow is.

The deadline for applications is 11.59pm on the 31st August 2018.


Exciting news from Spotify

The latest initiative with Electric Lady Studios and Berklee College of Music have launched their new EQL Studio Residency Program. You can find more info below.

Background

Women are severely underrepresented as artists, songwriters, engineers, and producers. In fact, women make up only 2% of female producers. We know that the reasons for the lack of diversity and inclusion, especially for women, in the music industry are complex and systemic. We can’t fix everything. However, we think that we have a unique opportunity to focus on creating visibility and opportunity for women in the music industry, particularly among female producer/engineers. That’s why we are partnering with Berklee College of Music and Electric Lady Studios to introduce the first-ever EQL Studio Residency.

Introducing the EQL Studio Residency

Starting in October, we will offer (3) paid Studio Residencies to women in NYC, Nashville, and London. During these paid six-month residencies, these women will have the opportunity to work in one of our studios, have access to networking and mentoring opportunities and gain valuable hands-on skills.

In NYC, we will be teaming up with iconic Electric Lady Studios where the resident will split her time between the Spotify Studios and Electric Lady Studios. In Nashville and London, the resident will work out of our Secret Genius studios where we have already shown a commitment to supporting emerging talent.

We are also partnering with Berklee College of Music’s Dean of the Professional Education Division and their newly formed Women Chair Forum. This group of female administrators will help to select the final three residents and then mentor these women for the duration of the program, providing valuable networking and coaching opportunities

Timing

The posting for these positions is live now!

Application closes at 5 pm EST on August 24
https://newsroom.spotify.com/…/announcing-the-eql-studio-r…/
Residents will start Oct 1


SoundGirls Resources

Directory of Women in Professional Audio and Production

This directory provides a listing of women in disciplines industry-wide for networking and hiring. It’s free – add your name, upload your resume, and share with your colleagues across the industry.

SoundGirls – Gaston-Bird Travel Fund

Letter for Trades and Manufacturers


Women-Owned Businesses

A More Inclusive Industry

Events

Sexual Harassment

https://soundgirls.org/about-us/soundgirls-chapters/

Jobs and Internships

Women in the Professional Audio

Shadowing Opportunity w/ FOH Engineer Sean “Sully” Sullivan

SoundGirls Members who are actively pursuing a career in Live Sound or Concert Production are invited to shadow FOH Engineer Sean “Sully” Sullivan.

Sully has mixed FOH for everyone from Sheryl Crow, Thom Yorke,  Beck, Justin Timberlake, Rihanna & Red Hot Chili Peppers. He is currently mixing Shaina Twain.

The experience will focus on FOH Mixing. This is open to SoundGirls members ages 18 and over. There is one spot available for each show. Call times are TBD and members will most likely be invited to stay for the show (TBD).

Shaina Twain – European Dates

Shaina Twain – Australian and New Zealand Dates

Please fill out this application and send a resume to soundgirls@soundgirls.org with Sully in the subject line. If you are selected to attend, information will be emailed to you.

 

Shadowing Opportunity w/ FOH Engineer Kevin Madigan

SoundGirls Members who are actively pursuing a career in Live Sound or Concert Production are invited to shadow FOH Engineer Kevin Madigan.

The experience will focus on FOH Mixing. This is open to SoundGirls members ages 18 and over. There is one spot available for each show. Call times are TBD and members will most likely be invited to stay for the show (TBD).

Graham Nash

David Crosby

Please fill out this application and send a resume to soundgirls@soundgirls.org with Kevin Madigan in the subject line. If you are selected to attend, information will be emailed to you.

 

Performance Anxiety

I think pretty much everyone has at least once in their lifetime experienced anxiety in one way or another. Personally, my anxiety is a good old friend I have had with me for years. It is something I always have struggled with and there is different reasons to why that is, but some reasons that stands out the most is; I am a perfectionist and I am not best friends with failure.

For a lot of people, I think it is hard to admit that you suffer from anxiety and the impact it may have on your life. I used to be like that because I felt like I was overreacting.

In my previous blog post ‘A lesson about fun & failure,’ I briefly mentioned and touched on the subject about failure. My anxiety, and probably for a lot of people, is linked to the fear of failure.

I have studied music for many years; I began at the age of 11 to play classical piano. I love playing the piano, and I learned sight-reading from an early age. I played Mozart, Beethoven, Bach and I to this day absolutely love their compositions. But, what I could not get my head around was that I could not play those pieces perfectly every time. I got so angry with myself for messing it up to the point where I stopped enjoying playing the piano because I felt like I was failing.

Throughout college, I had to go through plenty of live performances, all of which I suffered terrible anxiety attacks from. I simply did not want to be on stage; I could not deal with the pressure and the possibility of failing. The pressure I put on myself, not anybody else, I’ve realised now later in life.

This is one of the main reasons I chose to work behind the stage and what makes me love and care so much about live performances. For me, it is so important that artists feel comfortable whilst being on stage because I know what it feels like when you don’t.

Performance anxiety is so important to acknowledge and to deal with in all aspects and careers of life. We put so much pressure on ourselves, from such an early age, it affects our mental health severely. It’s good to be ambitious, but when is it too much? At what point do we tell ourselves ‘hey it’s getting a bit too much now’?. Especially within the music industry, it is a very fast-paced industry and you’re expected to be multi-talented from a young age.

Sometimes it is not about overcoming your anxiety, sometimes it is merely about becoming friends with it. Nowadays I handle it in such a way that I give myself some time and space. I analyse what is going on in my life, usually my anxiety flares up when I’ve got too many things going on at the same time and really should’ve said no to a couple of jobs. I get terrible anxiety when I am new to things, especially jobs, to the point where I feel nauseous and overthink every possible scenario that might happen. But when this happens I tell myself that everything will be ok, one way or another.

We are only human in the end of the day, and as I have learned along the way, it is perfectly normal to feel anxious sometimes. However, if you feel like you need help to improve your anxiety and mental health do not hesitate to get in touch with your GP. There are also great apps to manage and improve your mental health here: https://apps.beta.nhs.uk/category/mental_health/.

 

Missed this Week’s Top Stories? Read our Quick Round-up!

It’s easy to miss the SoundGirls news and blogs, so we have put together a round-up of the blogs, articles, and news from the past week. You can keep up to date and read more at SoundGirls.org

August Feature Profile

Karol Urban – Sound and Storytelling

The Blogs

Live Digital Audio in Plain English Part 1

Basic Sound Circuit Glossary

El proceso creativo de la Iluminación

The Creative Process of Illumination


SoundGirls News

SoundGirls Expo in Orlando, Florida

SoundGirls and Girls Rock Camp

Seeking SoundGirls For Music Expo – Nashville

GIRLSCHOOL New York 2018

Career Paths in Film and Television Sound

https://soundgirls.org/event/bringing-the-audience-closer-soundgirls-at-plasa-2018/?instance_id=1321

SoundGirls and SoundGym

Shadowing Opportunity w/Guit Tech Claire Murphy

Shadowing Opportunity w/ ME Aaron Foye

https://soundgirls.org/event/bay-area-soundgirls-sept-meeting/?instance_id=1317

Round Up From the Internet

The Time After: Dealing With Post Show Blues

Ann Mincieli On ‘She Is The Music,’ Jungle City, Drake, Alicia Keys & More

 


SoundGirls Resources

Directory of Women in Professional Audio and Production

This directory provides a listing of women in disciplines industry-wide for networking and hiring. It’s free – add your name, upload your resume, and share with your colleagues across the industry.

SoundGirls – Gaston-Bird Travel Fund

Letter for Trades and Manufacturers


Women-Owned Businesses

SoundGirls Scholarships 2021 Now Open

Events

Sexual Harassment

https://soundgirls.org/about-us/soundgirls-chapters/

Jobs and Internships

Women in the Professional Audio

Live Digital Audio in Plain English Part 1

Digitizing the audio

Digital audio is nothing new, but there is still a lot of misunderstanding and confusion about how it really works, and how to fix it when things go wrong. If you’ve ever tried to find out more about digital audio topics, you will know that there are a lot of dry, complicated, and frankly, boring articles out there, seemingly written by automatons. I’m going to spend the next few posts tackling the fundamental ideas, specifically as they relate to live audio (rather than recording, which seems to have been covered a lot more), in plain English. For the sake of clarity and brevity, some things may be oversimplified or a bit wrong. If unsure, consult the internet, your local library, or a pedantic friend.

So, how does audio become digital in the first place? The analogue signal travels from the source (e.g., a mic) into the desk or its stagebox, where it gets turned into a series of 1s and 0s by an analogue-digital converter (AD converter or ADC). AD converters work by taking lots of snapshots (called samples) of the waveform in very quick succession to build up a digital reconstruction of it: a method known as pulse-code modulation (PCM. Don’t worry about remembering all these terms; it’s just useful to understand the whole process. In over ten years of live gigs, I’ve never heard anyone discuss PCM, and I’ve heard some pretty nerdy conversations). Two factors control how accurate that reconstruction will be: sample rate and bit depth.

Sample rate is the rate at which the samples are taken! Not surprisingly, the more samples per second, the smaller the gap between them (sample interval) and the less information that is lost. Think of it like frame rate in film – a low sample rate is like a jerky, stop-motion video, high sample rate is like 48 frames per second fancy Peter Jackson stuff.

Bit depth is the number of bits (piece of information encoded in binary for electronic use – so a 0 or a 1) in each sample. 8 bits make a byte, and samples are set to capture the same number of bytes each time. They record the amplitude of the signal – more bits mean there are more discrete amplitudes that it can be recorded as (See figure 1), so the resolution of the soundwave becomes clearer. Bits are like pixels on a screen – low bit depth is similar to blocky, unclear footage, high bit depth is like high definition where you can see every detail. Back in the early days of computer games, there wasn’t much available memory in the cartridges, so all the sound was recorded in 8-bit. The low-resolution audio matched the pixelated video.

Figure 1: Bit depth vs. sample rate. Time is represented on the x-axis, amplitude on the y-axis. Source: https://www.horusmusic.global/music-formats-explained/ Original source unknown.

Looking at figure 1, it’s clear that the longer the bit depth and the higher the sample rate, the closer you can get to the original waveform. Realistically you can’t take an infinite number of infinitely detailed samples every second – even very high values of each produce an unmanageable amount of data to process, and costs too much to be practical. The Nyquist-Shannon theorem states that to reproduce a waveform accurately for a given bandwidth you need to take more than twice as many samples per second as the highest frequency that you are converting. If you take fewer samples than the highest frequency, an entire wavelength could happen between samples but wouldn’t be recorded. With between as many and twice as many, you still wouldn’t collect enough data about that waveform to differentiate it from all other frequencies, as is shown in figure 2.

Figure 2: Aliasing. If a waveform isn’t sampled often enough, it can be confused with other, lower frequency, ones.Source: Eboomer84 via Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aliasing.JPG

For music, we usually assume the bandwidth is the range of human hearing: roughly 20Hz-20kHz. Twice that range is just under 40kHz, but the Sony corporation figured out that 44.1kHz synced up nicely with the video recording equipment they already had while leaving a nice margin for error, so it became the standard for recording film audio and CDs. Later 48kHz was adopted because it worked well with new digital video recording gear, and could reproduce even higher frequencies. Most digital mixing desks work on 48kHz or 96kHz.

Moiré patterns like this, or the weird lines when you take a photo of a screen, can be caused by the visual equivalent of aliasing. We have more in common with the video department than we might like to admit. Credit: “angry aliasing in a webgl fragment shader” by Adam Smith on flickr. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/

Why bother with 96kHz? No one can hear 48kHz, so what’s the point in sampling enough to cover it? It isn’t strictly necessary, but there are a few reasons to do it anyway. Firstly there’s the argument that, much like when choosing a speaker’s frequency range, frequencies above the limit of human hearing can still affect the overall waveform, and so ignoring them can change the resulting sound. Secondly, in digital sampling, higher frequencies can have a real and detrimental effect called aliasing. In figure 2 you can see that the AD converter would not be able to tell whether the points it’s recorded belong to a very high-frequency waveform or a lower one. It has been told what bandwidth to expect to see, so it will assume that waveform is the lower one, within the defined bandwidth. This causes it to be artificially added to the digital audio, making it sound… just not quite right. AD converters use low pass filters, called anti-aliasing filters, to get rid of these high frequencies but they aren’t perfect; they aren’t like a brick wall stopping everything above 20kHz (or whatever they’re set to) getting through, they have a sloping response just like other filters. Increasing the sample rate can clarify which waveform is which and take the pressure off the anti-aliasing filter, moving the highest frequency that can be accurately recognised higher than that slope. Thirdly, AD converters use complex mathematical formulae to take an educated guess at filling in the blanks between samples, known as quantisation. The more samples you have, the smaller the blanks that need to be filled and the more accurate that quantisation can be.

Increasing the bit depth also greatly reduces quantisation errors. Quantisation is basically rounding to the nearest amplitude point to smooth off the ‘pixelated’ waveform – more bits mean more options to find as close a point to the real value as possible. When this process is inaccurate, the guesswork introduces noise that isn’t present in the original signal. Increasing the bit depth reduces that guesswork, increasing the ‘signal to quantisation noise ratio.’ 24 bit, which is common in live digital audio, can give you over 120dB of dynamic range because it significantly lowers that quantisation noise floor, and so can give your true signal more space and reduce the likelihood of it clipping.

As ever, your sound will only be as good as the weakest link in the chain. You might never notice the differences between these options in a live setting as a lot of live gear is not sensitive enough to show them. This might be why there is so much more discussion about them in relation to studios. However, it helps to know what processes are at work, especially when it comes to troubleshooting, which I’ll cover in a future post.


Beth O’Leary is a freelance live sound engineer and tech-based in Sheffield, England. While studying for her degree in zoology, she got distracted working for her university’s volunteer entertainments society and ended up in the music industry instead of wildlife conservation. Over the last ten years, she has done everything from pushing boxes in tiny clubs to touring arenas and spends a lot of her life in muddy fields working on most of the major festivals in the UK. She has a particular passion for flying PA, the black magic that is RF, travel, and good coffee. 

Read Beth’s Blog

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