West Park Park Bench Podcast ep 16 - All or Nothing | Audio

10:04AM Oct 4, 2022

Speakers:

Caron Lyon

Keywords:

audio

microphone

audience

people

mic

space

zoom

desk

sound

cameras

fed

venue

noise reduction

hear

noise

digital

amplify

important

beast

bluetooth

Welcome to Episode 16 of the West Park Park Bench Podcast.

Following on from last week, which was 'All or Nothing, connectivity' this week is 'All or Nothing, Audio'.

No matter how good your visuals are, if you are doing an event that has poor audio, it can spoil the entire thing. Now, when you're in a physical space, that's amplification, you might have a balance of your microphone on stage that's just lifting the audio of the room and public address PA systems. That's what they they tend to be there for and bad audio in those circumstances can be if the speaker stands too close to a speaker and you get that sort of howl round that feedback noise that kind of really gets your ears or it can just sound tinny or too bassy or not quite be comfortably audible. So in a physical space that amplification system and we theatre you do tend to have boundary mics which are picking up the ambient noise of what's been said and just lifting the volume with the musicals with spaces where the acoustics don't quite reach to the back properly. Performers might be miked, and then you'll have a radio mic and they tend to have the radio mic fed up through the hair and pit taped to the front of their forehead or behind their ear if they have to do weak changes or if they have to somehow put hats on and off and things so there'll be different places where a performer will prefer to have their radio mic. So that's a space where there's noise making it slightly louder so that people in the room can hear it. However, when you have entered the arena of zoom and going into COVID and pre COVID When I was doing live streams, the audio that you would pick up to amplify into the room actually doesn't get amplified into the room. It goes straight into your computer and fed to the audience in the digital audience. And if there are no mics there's no audio. So acoustically you cannot get audio from a room to someone sat on the other side of a call without a microphone or without a pickup of some kind. And it's surprising how hard it is to mic a room. Because a room has many qualities. It has its own resonance, it has its own ambience. It then has the peripheral noises, people moving chairs around people shifting around in their seats. And then of course, you've got the content that you actually want to amplify. And a microphone isn't intelligent enough in its on its own, to be able to distinguish any of that noise. You might have some noise reduction software, you may have heard noise reduction software that can kind of get rid of dog barks or it can judge that background noise. And one of the problems that people with Zoom had over the pandemic was that algorithm to cut out background noise and only listen to the voice. It's very problematic if you want to play music in the background. teaching music doing fitness classes. One of the first things that I was doing during COVID was helping people understand how you can switch off that noise reduction facility and use original sound in zoom. Just a story of way before COVID I did some live streaming at the Excel Centre a big conference centre in London for architects journal, and they had an award ceremony and the idea was that we were going to livestream from the venue to a digital audience. They had a digital they had people in the space. And when I was booked for that gig, I was booked to look after the digital audience. There was no discussion about the physical audience being able to hear anything. One of my first jobs

Okay, we're gonna need microphones. So we had a handheld radio mic fed into our system. But there were no speakers in the space to amplify that out. So ironically, we ended up having to feed our sound for the digital audience back through a set of speakers they got hold of and there was a really strange delay because there's often a latency delay between audio in the room and audio that gets heard on Zoom. But if you aren't hearing both, you only hear the one that's got the second delay on it. You don't know that it's got a second delay on it. So audio is really key and not just the quality but this what you can hear because it reaches your audience at a different rate. And strangely audio is kind of dealt with as a secondary citizen and yet it is the most vital component to achieving that, that quality.

So I tend to use a lot of high end domestic microphone equipment. So on my desk I have got a Blue Snowball. And that is really good for just picking up by voice. It's very old now. So there's a lot more microphones that are a much higher quality but for me and for what I need for a clean audio. It does mean good. That soon as you move away from that microphone, you only need to take two or three steps away and it doesn't pick you up it doesn't reach that far. I've also got a couple of radio mics which plug into my point and shoot cameras that are lapel mics or lavalier mics my Bluetooth and they are fantastic. They work on the cameras, but so far I've not had those in a computer system. It also have a table podcasting mic that has both sides of the microphone are live so I can sit either side on a table. But all of these microphones are for close proximity therefore two metres away from the microphone. Max. And with USB microphones. I don't have any kind of volume level control except what's built into something like zoom, which you can get to and you can control but it's very, very, very minimal. And the reason for this all or nothing episode is I really have reached the point in my journey coming out of COVID where the equipment that I depended on before COVID just doesn't cut the mustard anymore.

I'm now in spaces where I don't have sound desk on site. A technician who's provided microphones because in those situations you arrive at a venue microphones have been booked with the space. They're all connected up. They've all been sound checked into a sound desk and then I take a feed out of the sound desk into my computer. And then I can control a fader either on the sound desk or I can get the sound engineer to ride a fader if I need it. So going from the audio that was perfectly acceptable for a safe committee meeting a maybe a meeting that held 20 people who were sat paying attention to the people speaking at the front, I've started to move into events that are a little bit more immersive a little bit more social. And those events enable the audience to be a bit more lively. And that means that my microphones struggle a little bit more. So the microphone for the most recent so beast and tails. This is where my audio experimentation is going to be put into practice for me to tune the offering because other thing about my kit is that it all has to fit into my willable box. I travel with that box. It has everything in it. I have a backpack that has a few more bits but has my clothes if I'm travelling, and it's always been really, really important for me to have a very minimal carbon footprint for the live stream stuff that I'm doing.

And that really is my USP my unique selling point is that I can go into a space. I don't have big things to park I don't have broadcast truck, I don't have a big camera and add an entry point.

I think it is so so important for people to be able to utilise that service without having to spend a fortune. And that's really important. Because the accessibility especially coming out of zoom now that people have really embraced more notions of accessibility that's not just around economics, but actually about access, about the geography of the place that you're going. There still has to be a fee attached to those tickets.

And as a perfect example of that beast entails. In the audience, there was about 30 And they all paid a ticket fee. And the digital audience paid a fee but it was less of a fee because we're in trial and we don't feel that we can charge full price right now. And as it was the audio wasn't as I would like it to be the space cost a fixed amount of money. The physical audience alone did not cover the cost of the storytellers and the venue. Because we had the digital audience we had 17 People in the digital audience paying five pound each that amount of money tipped over the breakeven points so that it makes it feasible for beasts and tails to continue having the physical event and that is a proof of concept was just music to my ears.

So the audio to be able to take up the ticket price. That audio has got to be sharp. You've got to be able to know that you're not there because you can't travel. You're not there because time just wouldn't allow you geography doesn't permit it. But you can afford to contribute. And also you do want to have a social component. I do have a talk back and forward with the audience that were there. I did get them to put where they were from in the chat with me on camera before everything starts. We had people from Canada, we had someone from New York, we had someone from the Lake District, we had people from just down the road in Beeston and the one thing that we exchanged most about on the chat was the quality of the audio and I know that the audio was audible, but I know that the audio would not have been as clean as it could be. And that is going to be what I'm doing going forward. So all or nothing for this episode. Just audio is really key.

I do want to write a little bit about these all or nothing podcast episodes, turn them into some articles. I'm going to be getting a USB desk so I'm going to have a small mixing desk that I can plug into my computer that I can put microphones into it, put the Lavalier receivers in so that I can have radio mics. I can also put audio through from the house music. I can also feed that out into space to amplify if I need to.

And I think the key thing, the other event that I attended I say I attended I produced, that you would have heard in Episode 15 was the 22 ideas about the future book launch, which had a more complicated audio setup which did have an engineer on site. But even then, between three of us there was I'm gonna do a shout out to Luke Robert Mason. He was absolutely superb. He was there to capture the audio for podcast quality and he bought some microphones and he had a sound card interface. The venue Declan Patterson, shout out to Declan Newspeak house. absolute Godsend was there to just make the process of getting their kit into my machine. Just worked seamlessly and together the three of us we did manage to get a zoom call into the space and also audio back out to the audience.

We managed to get audio from the audience, amplified a little bit in the room through the speakers. And we also got the audio from the room into a zoom call, which was then running on another machine which was connecting into alt space, the VR platform, which was then taking audio into there. We didn't actually have audio from alt space. So that's going to be the next challenge. Can we complete the loop?

So my challenge this week get this podcast up and thank you so much for listening, if you've reached to the end, and it's your first time and you go Who is this woman? I am Caron Lyon @pcmcreative across the interwebs and I'm an independent theatre producer specialising in small scale immersive audience experience where where possible immersion for the comfort of your couch. So that is going to be an ongoing project.

This episode has been all or nothing audio and bit of rambling. It's the first time I've really talked about the audio stuff that I do and it is so important. So I hope it has made sense and I hope there's some pearls of wisdom do let me know if there's something particular that I've mentioned that you're interested about, whether it's the Bluetooth mics that plug into my point and click cameras or whether it's the Bluetooth snowball and the podcasting whether it's the USB desk, but I will be catching up on how that journey that all or nothing audio journey goes because for me that is that that that is my holy grail right now of being able to have all audio that people don't notice. Not that they don't complain about audio that they don't notice the quality is good enough and high quality enough that they just don't think about it. They actually watch the content because that's what it's about.

So thank you so much for listening.

This has been episode 16 of the West Park Park Bench Podcast.