Empowering the Next Generation of Women in Audio

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Sexual Harassment Seminar

SoundGirls will be hosting a seminar on sexual harassment with Kim Warnick.

 
 

Kim Warnick is a sexual violence prevention and response expert with program design, project management, and communications experience in corporate, start-up, and nonprofit organizations. She designed and leads the #HereForTheMusic campaign at Calling All Crows to prevent sexual harassment and violence in the live music industry. She has a specific interest in workplace sexual violence and helping companies to be proactive in creating safer working conditions for all employees

You should be able to feel comfortable in your place of work or learning. If you are being sexually harassed, you can report it to the authorities at your job or school, but what happens when you are a freelance contractor? Sexual harassment can occur in a variety of circumstances. The harasser can identify with any gender and have any relationship to the victim, including being a direct manager, indirect supervisor, coworker, teacher, peer, or colleague.

The seminar will cover:

 

Shadow Beth O’Leary ME Tech on Kylie Minogue

SoundGirls Members who are actively pursuing a career in Live Sound or Concert Production are invited to shadow monitor system tech Beth O’Leary on Kylie Minogue.

Beth O’Leary is a freelance live sound engineer and tech-based in Sheffield, England. 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

The experience will focus on the monitor system set up and Beth’s responsibilities. This is open to SoundGirls members ages 18 and over. There is one spot available for each show. Call times are TBD. Unfortunately, members will not be able to stay for the show (unless you have a ticket).

Kylie Minogue – European Dates

September:
18th: Metro Radio Arena Newcastle
20th: Motorpoint Arena Nottingham
21st: Genting Arena Birmingham
22nd: Bournemouth International Centre, Bournemouth
24th: Motorpoint Arena Cardiff
26th, 27th, 28th: O2 Arena London
30th: SSE Hydro Arena Glasgow

October:
1st: Manchester Arena Manchester
3rd: Echo Arena Liverpool
4th: First Direct Arena Leeds
7th: 3Arena Dublin
8th: SSE Arena Belfast

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

 

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.

 

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.

 

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

Leyla Kumble – Founder of Girls are Loud

As a consumer of music you may not pay attention to how many artists playing on the radio, or on your Spotify list are women.  It may not come to mind to ask yourself if a woman produced your favorite song, or if it was a woman who engineered the album of your favorite band.

But, if you are a woman trying to make a successful career in the music industry, those statistics matter.  A lot.

Music, like a lot of industries, is a male-dominated field.  More specifically in the areas of songwriting to sound engineering,  less than 7% of these areas are employed by women. But, make no mistake that these numbers certainly do not reflect the number of women who are experienced and capable of creating music.

Meet Leyla Kumble.  She is the creator of Girls Are Loud, a collective of female-identifying instrumentalists that provides solo songwriters with the resources they need to record all aspects of their song live – including studio space. Founded in 2016, Girls Are Loud makes its home in the heart of Los Angeles giving a positive space for artists to collaborate and network with other women. Kumble, who learned to play guitar at a young age, has worked in artist development for quite some time, so she knew that creating an organization for women to feel welcomed and appreciated was needed.

I recently talked with Leyla Kumble to learn what inspired her to create this unique and important collective.

MA:  What year did you start Girls Are Loud, and where did it originate?

LK: I started Girls are Loud in May 2016 in LA. It was born out of an idea I had in college for Stax-like recording, itself a product of a deep love of jazz, a desire for more time to be in studios, and a bunch of friends who were good at music but needed the helping hand of a collaborator. In 2015, when I started delving deep into the history of women’s rights issues and growing curious as to why they’re absent from a lot of studios or don’t feel comfortable in them, it tipped me into going a little further with the company idea and making it into a fully women run and populated endeavor.

MA:  Please share a little bit about yourself. Do you have a background in music?  Do you play any instruments and/or sing?

LK: I grew up listening to Billy Joel, Simon and Garfunkel, and Queen, and started to really get into music when I began playing guitar when I was 8. I’m by no means confident or perhaps talented enough to be a musician full-time, so I put my heart into A&R. I loved finding artists who needed a little bit of development but were on the cusp of something brilliant. I love working with an artist to develop their songs and it’s something I’ve done when interning in studios, A&R and management companies. I interned in A&R for three years and when I got my first job, I worked with film composers at WME, the talent agency. It was there I met more session musicians and instrumentalists.

MA: How have Girls Are Loud impacted the music community for women since its inception?

LK: What I’ve found to be the most rewarding is that through Girls Are Loud, I’m introducing female musicians to each other. I’ve watched friendships form and collaborations emerge because of those introductions. I’ve heard artists and instrumentalists talk about how much more relaxed and comfortable they feel when they’re not the minority in the room. It’s also been fun to give female musicians opportunities they wouldn’t have been able to get on their own. The amount of times I’ve heard an artist say, I’ve always wanted a female drummer but didn’t know one…

MA:  What are some of the most memorable artists/event projects you’ve worked on so far?

LK: We’re still in the proof-of-concept stage. We’ve worked with three artists and the one I personally was really excited for was our second session with Georgia Nott from the band Broods. I grew up in New Zealand – where she’s from – so it was lovely to champion someone from my home in LA, but also I’ve always been such a huge fan of Broods so I was excited to work with her.

MA:  Do you have anything exciting for Girls Are Loud coming up that you would like to share?

LK: We just signed our first artist, Adetola (video below), so that’s an exciting step forward. I am now embarking on investor rounds to build this into a sustainable record label and that’ll determine how long we stay around!

 

Finding that Job

As I see postings online from people asking for advice about how to start their careers just out of school or how to change their careers to join the audio world, it makes me think about the job hiring process and changes I went through about a year ago. It had been a while coming. I knew I was ready for a change, but I was waiting for the right change through finding the right job. Looking back, I’m not sure if finding the right position was the proper way to look as much as something that would be different and would challenge me, but also keep me engaged while learning new things. Overall, looking back I think I learned the most during the interview processes I went through followed by actually moving and experiencing all the change.

Once I made my choice about wanting to move, I then had to search for a new job.  Using all the popular sites, I found it wasn’t that straightforward to find the kind of job I was looking for. In our industry, we use a unique language to get our work done. Hiring managers and job boards don’t necessarily understand that language either.  Yes, there are job boards out there just for our industry, but there are many entities hiring that won’t use those boards because it is too specific to the industry for the 1 or 2 positions they have. The corporate environment will either use a recruiter to get down into an intricate area of a specific industry or will hope the keywords match on a large job board site.  As you start your search, get creative with the job title words you search for. A venue manager may be listed under Facilities Coordinator, or A1 could be listed as Technician.

You will likely apply for a lot of jobs. Don’t just apply for one at a time, apply for all the jobs that interest you and that you are qualified for.  Response rates can be slow, and you don’t want to waste valuable time and good opportunities hoping you will hear from one specific place. You could miss out on better opportunities. You could also miss out on valuable experience interviewing too.  During the interview is where you will learn most about the organization and their expectations for you and the position. They will spend a majority of the time talking to you about your qualifications to see how you will fit in their world, but it is also ok for you to ask questions to see if you will fit in their world too.  More than just skills need for a job; you need to determine if you can work for them. We spend a lot of our lives working, so I advise making sure you work for an entity that you are willing to spend a lot of your life at.

As you apply to different jobs, I recommend keeping a copy of the job description as well as the cover letter and resume you submitted. This way if you do get an interview you will have a copy of the resources you provided them since they should be tailored for that specific application.

As you are interviewing watch for the positive and negatives of the organization. Ask strategic questions regarding the research you have done on the organization and learn as much as you can to make a decision later on. Some red flags to watch for are how they communicate with you before, during, and after the interview. Is it concise communication or are they sending you mixed messages? Do they call you back when they say they will? Does the hiring manager or person who greets you at the start of the interview speak positively about the organization and the environment they work in?

Watch for the red flags like managers telling you just a little too much about the organization’s dysfunction or personal information about possible future co-workers. Dodging the questions you’re asking, or interviewing a couple of times with the same person only to learn you have two or three more interview steps to go that will be scheduled over the next few weeks.  Be cautious of interviews that are continuously scheduled with the same person over and over. This may be a sign the organization is not ready to hire someone, or that management is not genuinely interested in you. Don’t forget to ask about their timeline to complete the hiring process too.

I went on one interview last year where there were some red flags when they asked me what I did with downtime during work hours, and how I would handle a continuously light schedule. I answered as clearly as I could, but couldn’t help but wonder – Am I going to be bored working here? Will there be a challenge for me?  During that same interview, a staff member also shared with me the ‘drama’ within the department. There will always be differences among co-workers, but if that’s shared during the interview process, it should make you wonder how much ‘drama’ is happening on a daily basis. They also shared how the organization did not support the department, which was surprising to hear. Those were all signs that working in that environment would not have been for me. So when the job offer came, I knew the job wasn’t for me.

On the other hand, watch for the positive signs such as a hiring process that is well organized, welcoming, and that you get a great vibe while you are going through the process. They provide precise information about, organization and the job in which you are interviewing for.  In my opinion, the interview process should feel good, maybe a little nerve-wracking while in the process, but good afterward. Be prepared for many different kinds of approaches as you may work with recruiters or hiring managers, but you could also be talking directly with the president or owner as well.  Expect multiple steps to the interview like a video or phone interview first, a general interview second, then maybe a management interview to finish the process.

Then if you’re right for them and it’s right for you get ready for your next adventure!  Starting a new job can be significant and scary at the same time. No matter what it will be a great experience to add to your tool belt. Also, remember as you get your first or second job within the audio or events world, remember all of us SoundGirls are here to help along the way!

 

Editing Sound Girls into Wikipedia

This March I unofficially participated in Kickstarter’s Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon.  An edit-a-thon is an event where the attendees edit and update Wikipedia articles. Often these events have a specified purpose, and with Art+Feminism it was about women and the arts. While it generally happens in March, the Art+Feminism banner has hosted over 500 events almost every week across the globe since 2014. Events have occurred in places like the Ivory Coast, New Zealand, Uruguay, United States, and Germany.

Why is editing a Wikipedia article so important?

First of all, Wikipedia is the modern equivalent of an encyclopedia; it is the first stop in finding an answer. With over 5.6 million articles in the English language, it is one of the most comprehensive collections of knowledge available. Currently, there are very few female Wikipedia editors and a very small percentage of female-related articles. Art+Feminism is looking to change that by training new Wikipedia editors (it could be you or me or anyone). They are not the only ones either. Wikipedia has its own group of Wikiprojects dedicated to providing female-related articles.

Editing an Article

While I had not formally edited a Wikipedia article before, I was vaguely familiar with their style and guidelines, so I thought I would try my hand in becoming a Wikipedia editor and share my experiences with SoundGirls. I had some knowledge of formatting and citing in the Wikipedia style, but I also made sure to keep several tabs open of Wikipedia’s helpful tutorials.

Wikipedia requires strict standards in sources, citations, and sentence structure. There is a lot to keep in mind when writing an article, and so Wikipedia has tutorials and templates to copy from. Self-promotion is not permitted when creating an article. Therefore, sources cannot be a personal website or an IMDB page. Bias is also frowned upon, which means many controversial articles are locked from the fledgling editor.

Often new editors are guided to almost complete topics, ones that only need cleanup in citations or a couple of extra facts.  Many niche articles are plagued with improper citation and writing flags. From there, an editor can build up their chops before turning to a completely new article. Focusing on pre-existing articles also helps with the moderating backlog that is a constant problem for Wikipedia.

Creating an Article

Even knowing all of this, I still decided to create a completely new article.  I wrote about Karen Lam, a female film director, and producer, known for her horror short films and for promoting other women in film.  While I did meet her briefly, I have no professional association with her, and therefore I had no conflict of interest with which to color the tone of my article.  She had been interviewed several times in local and national magazines, and her films had won several awards. This meant that she was relevant and documented enough to have an article based off of her. I, the lowly blog writer, still early in my career, do not have the right credentials to have a Wikipedia article, and so it goes. As an added bonus, a film directed by Karen had its own article already and therefore referenced my subject. An article that is not referenced by anything else is an orphan, which often suggests the irrelevance of the topic.

Not including the time it took to research her, I was able to write my article and submit it for the first time during the Art+Feminism event, and within minutes I received my first error flag. I had cited IMDB for awards won by my subject, and so I updated the article, took out a few awards that were only listed on IMDB, and put a new award mentioned in a reputable press release. I did not hear back for a month an a half. My article was then finally approved.

Wikipedia Advice

Wikipedia was made to be edited by the public, and it can be another tool to grow the influence of women in media and to break the glass fader.

 

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