Considering Context and Genre in Live Sound Environments
In the world of live sound, we all too often ask a question and meet a frustratingly common answer. I’ve heard it repeated more times than I can count. Two words… “it depends.” This Catch-22 seems to chase us around as live sound professionals, but what exactly is “it”? Well, that “it” is our context, the scenario we’re working in and around. So let’s chase down why “it depends” is an accurate answer that ranges from houses of worship to arena tours and why our context is what we depend on to make informed decisions and adjust our workflow accordingly on a day-to-day basis.
Spoken-word Focus
Let’s start on any given Sunday morning. Say you’re standing in a house of worship. There are rows of seating across a hall and a stage towards the front of the room. There’s some walk-in music playing and people are milling about, saying hello and finding their seats. From there, a band walks on stage and starts playing. A worship band plays a short set. At the end of the live music, a preacher comes out on stage and begins preaching. As he walks out onto the stage, the listeners take their seats.
In less than 30 minutes in this one venue, listeners have gone from moving to static standing to seated. So, when drawing this room in my modeling software, how do I know what height to think of listeners as “listening from?”
Before assigning your poor front-of-house engineer to re-deploy the sound system for every portion of the event, let’s consider the event’s context from the attendees’ point of view. As standing listeners walk into the room, we have a participating audience who doesn’t focus on the content of the sound coming through the system at this moment. We’re just helping create an atmosphere with our playlist. In this environment, our SPL is likely much lower. We’re looking not to be distracting with our sound, but as the order of events progresses, we now have a band onstage. We start to combine a mix as the audience interacts, whether standing and dancing or singing along. At this moment, the audience consists of active participants.
So now what’s left? When the speaker walks onto the stage and the listeners take their seats, we now, for the first time, reach the point in which the audience is actively listening, and it’s likely that what the speaker has to say is why they chose to attend this service. By looking at our setting, we can determine that our listeners would be best served if, as engineers, we make our decisions based on the idea that we have a seated audience listening to spoken word. While the audience’s interaction with sound changes throughout the event, the primary goal and overall context drive our decision-making.
Stepping Up to Arenas
Okay, let’s take a trip to the other end of the spectrum — an arena tour with a new artist. You’ve just been brought on board by the production team. As you prepare to embark on this tour, it’s your job to ensure that every person in the audience has the best possible experience—whether they’re sitting in the front row or the last seat in the venue.
So, what do we need to know to understand this scenario? In other words, what information is necessary to make the right decisions? Several factors, such as the artist’s preferences, the genre of music and the scale of the performance all play a role.
After an initial meeting, you now know this is a rap tour featuring music with heavy low-end. This knowledge of musical content and genre now informs our context for both subwoofer placement and quantity as well as stage monitoring needs. This leads us to a follow-up question: Is the artist sensitive to low-end energy on stage? If so, we’ll be looking at implementing strategies such as cardioid subs to help minimize the amount of low-end energy from the PA on stage.
Meeting Artists’ Directives
Next, we’ll ask if any other details would be pertinent to our work. Does the vocalist whisper when they sing, or is the stage volume from the band going to be a challenge to overcome? All of these questions may call for different gear choices and strategies to provide every person in the audience with the best possible experience. Some artists go as far as to provide a directive for their audio team or at least a clear-cut goal for their event or performance, whether it’s ensuring that every seat in the arena has the same experience or making the stage feel like a recording studio. There is almost always a clear “hill to die on” that lets us know we’ve met our goals — other than to vaguely “have a good-sounding show.” Using these questions to help define our context allows professionals to proactively address the artist’s and production’s concerns, ensuring we have a clear-cut priority and a lens through which to make decisions.
This concept doesn’t only apply to systems engineering and speaker placement. If we are looking to get the highest return on investment for the work we put into building a sonic experience of a show, as engineers, we need to minimize the amount of triage we need to do. This means not just considering the use of cardioid subs to help prevent low end energy on stage. It involves carefully planning and choosing microphones. It looks like placing these microphones on their respective instruments with intention, even auditioning mic capsules for vocalists to get the best out of your sources, and ideally starting as close to the end result as possible. The difference in polar patterns of wireless microphone capsules alone warrants choosing our gear with intention, because without thinking about what we are doing, with today’s technology it’s easy to become lost and overwhelmed with all of the options in front of us.
Trade-offs and Triage
Additionally, having information and consideration for our circumstances can also allow us to react well when we inevitably end up in triage mode. When trade-offs are forced to be made, we know what to preserve. If the goal is to have the same show in every seat and eliminate as much variance in the system as possible, we’ll likely hang delays. The point is that context dictates everything — from the products we choose to how a system is deployed. If the content is more message-driven, then perhaps we begin to prioritize intelligibility above all else to ensure the listeners hear the message.
As established previously, in live sound engineering, context is everything. Whether you’re working in a house of worship or an arena, your ability to understand and prioritize the artist’s needs and purpose behind the production can help create a solid foundation on which to build decisions — ultimately separating a good show from a great one. By being proactive in asking questions and simply looking around at how the audience interacts with an event, we can deliver a tailored audio experience that elevates the performance and meets the needs of both the artist and the audience.
Samantha Boone is a systems engineer and audio tech with experience designing and deploying sound systems for various applications ranging from clubs to large-scale festivals and arenas. Most recently, her work has involved designing and deploying large format, low-variance systems for installs and touring productions.
