audio engineering, technology, and miscellany . . .
Thrilled to once again be working alongside fellow educators mentoring students of the ArtsEngine Hammond Organ Project. The video above arrived unexpectedly in our email last week which really helped put a lot over the last 12 months into context.
Thanks to the Duderstadt Center & ArtsEngine for supporting this crazy project at work and to videographer Charles Wyson for reminding us all of the past year.
Was a blast supporting Artist-in-residence Omar Offendum w/ Ronnie Malley & Thanks Joey in partnership with UMS – University Musical Society! Photos above are from sessions and the video below was recorded post-residency.
Natural Beauty was one of the first events I had an opportunity to work at UM. Such an amazing performance!
A climate change inspired program depicting the human story through spoken word, video, and live percussion music.
DAMET Percussion
I’m incredibly proud to announce that I’ll be joining the University of Michigan in January 2019 as Assistant Manager of the Duderstadt Center Audio Studios. It has been a true pleasure to see and help usher in so much change over the past ~7 years in Ohio University’s Scripps College of Communication as part of the School of Media Arts & Studies.
That said, I’m so very excited to be teaming up with David Greenspan and his equally awesome colleagues at “The Dude” to keep up their truly amazing mission which is an opportunity I simply couldn’t pass up. These are just a few pictures of my favorite memories through the present, with one of the UofM studios as the featured image.
I will always have wonderfully-fond memories of Athens, OH especially the great OU students, new facilities we commissioned, and some really amazing projects I’ve had a privilege to work on. Here’s to the next chapter!
At the 2018 AES High School Audio Educators Conference hosted in Boston, Massachusetts from September 15 – 16, Ohio University Lecturer & AES Governor Kyle P. Snyder was pleased to serve on the conference committee as well as moderate and present on a particularly unique panel.
Certification, Articulation Agreements / Other Options, & Public / Private Partnerships
Workshop Links:
The 2018 AES High School Audio Educators Conference presented a remarkable opportunity to connect with audio professionals and educators – building skills around pedagogy, envisioning next level facilities, and creating transformative opportunities for young people in audio.
At the 144th Audio Engineering Society Convention hosted in Milan, Italy from May 23 – 26, Ohio University Lecturer & Director of Outreach Kyle P. Snyder presented on several topics.
Workshop Links:
The 144th AES Convention brought together the world’s largest gathering of audio professionals, offering attendees opportunities to hear from top audio industry figures while also sharing the latest research and technology information through informative papers, tutorials, workshops and special events.
The AES Milan Convention, taking place 23–26 May at the NH Hotel Milano Congress Centre in Milan, Italy, offered more ways to listen, learn and connect than ever before with its schedule of Student and Career development events. With significant savings on student All Access registration, attendees could affordably enjoy four full days of educational and career advancement events, a technical program featuring a host of presentations on a variety of audio engineering disciplines, special events such as the opening ceremonies and keynote speaker, and exhibition floor showcases and events from leading audio companies from around the world. Additional student activities include recording critiques, an Education and Career Fair, and newly expanded student design and recording competitions.
“AES Milan was a big convention for the Student Delegate Assembly (SDA) and for student involvement,” states Kyle P. Snyder, AES Governor and Education Committee Chair. “With exciting announcements in our expanded student recording competition which now includes a remix category, the Saul Walker AES Student Design Competition, our education and career fair, and more, students are given the opportunity to network not only with their peers from around the 
world, but also with the industry as a whole. The exchange of ideas and connections made at these conventions are crucial in our mission of education and promotion of the art and science of audio engineering, and, combined with outstanding industry support again this year, the AES Milan Convention will be a destination and experience exemplifying our theme, ‘The Power of Sound.’”
The official opening of the Convention’s student program, and a great opportunity to meet with fellow students from all corners of the world, is the opening SDA meeting. This event will introduce new events and election proceedings, announce candidates for the coming year’s election for the Europe and International Regions Vice Chair, announce the finalists in the Student Recording Competition categories and the Student Design Competition, and review the schedule of all student- and education-related events taking place at the convention. A closing SDA meeting will be held on the final day of the show, where the SDA will elect a new vice chair, and where competition comments and awards will be presented.
Student Recording Competition
The Student Recording Competition is a highlight at each AES convention, hosting a distinguished panel of judges to participate in critiquing finalists of each recording category in an interactive presentation and discussion. The top three finalists in each category present a short summary of their production intentions and the key recording and mix techniques used to realize their goals before playing their projects for attendees. This year, a new Remix category has been added, allowing competitors ample space and freedom to create what they feel best expresses, or enhances, the music from a provided track. The competition is a great chance for students to hear the work of their peers at other educational institutions and to network with other students and faculty.
Student Design Competition
The Saul Walker AES Student Design Competition is an opportunity for aspiring hardware and software engineers to participate in a worldwide contest during AES Conventions and gain recognition for their hard work, technical creativity, and ingenuity, as well as advice and mentorship from the competition judges. The competition is named in recognition of Mr. Walker’s tremendous impact on the audio industry as an inventor and as an educator. Awards will be presented for product designs including loudspeakers, DSP plug-ins, analog hardware, signal analysis tools, mobile applications, sound synthesis devices, and more.
AES MATLAB Plugin Student Competition and Showcase
Additionally, the AES will be announcing further details of a newly established AES MATLAB Plugin Student Competition and Showcase, in which students will design and present a new audio production VST plugin using MATLAB software. A special tutorial will be held at AES Milan, and later to be released as video, on the topic of MATLAB and outlining the competition’s rules and inaugural awards, to be given at the 145th AES International Convention in New York City in October 2018.
Education and Career Fair
The combined AES 144th Education and Career Fair will match job seekers with companies and prospective students with schools. Academic Institutions offering studies in audio (from short courses to graduate degrees) will be represented in a “table-top” session. Information on each school’s respective programs will be made available through displays and academic guidance. For those already searching for their entry or next path into audio engineering, AES Milan will host top companies looking for the best and brightest minds in the audio world. All attendees of the convention, students and professionals alike, are welcome to come visit with representatives from participating companies to find out more about job and internship opportunities in the audio industry.
Panel Discussions
As part of the ever-expanding program of Student & Career Development events at the convention, presentations providing insight from leading names in the industry also help give direction to those beginning or advancing their career in audio engineering. The open-format panel “Careers in the Professional Audio Industry – First Steps,” will be hosted by Richard Weir and cover marketing an individual to potential employers, how to format a CV/cover letter, and how to break into this exciting industry for those just starting out in your career.
The AES Milan Student Delegate Assembly will also host the presentation “Classical Music Recording Education Panel Discussion: Contemporary Production Practices and Training Engineers for Today and the Future,” with panelists from the UK, Canada, USA, and France. The panel will discuss ways in which orchestras and opera houses around the world are engaging audiences by experimenting with new and often simultaneous modes of distribution, emerging formats, and new technologies – for example, VR, 3D audio, and “live from…” simulcasts – as well as future obstacles and opportunities to optimize such recordings for maximum impact and preservation in the future.
Click here for the latest announcements on Student and Career Development events during the AES Milan Convention.
Themed “The Power of Sound,” the 144th International AES Convention will bring together audio professionals, students, enthusiasts and advanced audio technologies from around the world for four days of audio immersion, experiences and networking. Register now at for AES Milan at aeseurope.com for Advance Registration rates through 1 May, including additional discount pricing for AES Member and students. Complimentary Exhibits-Plus badges are also available by using code AES144NOW at checkout.
As part of a progressive movement to put students ahead of their time with professions in audio engineering and multimedia content creation, Ohio University’s Scripps College of Communication incorporated RDL’s TP-HA1A FORMAT-A™ Headphone Amplifier, along with other RDL FORMAT-A and Dante networked audio products, into its new Schoonover Center for Communication.
While the School of Media Arts & Studies (MDIA) at Ohio University is already globally recognized for its diverse programs in the media industries, the Schoonover Center demonstrates forward thinking from the school’s faculty, says Lecturer and Outreach Coordinator Kyle P. Snyder.
“We’re training students for jobs that do not yet exist, but will in 18 months,” he recently stated in an article for ProSoundNetwork.com
Snyder, a systems engineer on the Schoonover Center project, says that they designed the Critical Listening and Post-Production Studio as a facility where students can learn a variety of listening and playback scenarios, both conventional and cutting edge.
Schoonover Center was a multi-year renovation that brought all the schools of Ohio University under the same roof for the first time since 1968. Snyder says they implemented the RDL FORMAT-A/Dante headphone solution, which was “a major upgrade over our previous facility. This new studio allows us to teach updated technology and techniques to students and prepares them for the audio jobs of tomorrow.”
The Schoonover Post-Production and Critical Listening Lab is comprised of the following: a 32-fader Yamaha Nuage control surface (driven by Nuendo and Yamaha interfaces); a Dynaudio BM15A 5.1 surround monitoring array; 22 RDL TP-HA1A stereo headphone amplifiers on student desks; three RU-TPDA FORMAT-A distributors; and an RDL RU-NFDP Dante to FORMAT-A Interface, which connects the headphone amplifiers to the Dante network.
RDL’s FORMAT-A family of products send, receive, and distribute audio and DC power over standard CATx cable and connectors. When combined with RDL FORMAT-A/Dante interface products, all FORMAT-A products may be used as Dante endpoints.
Starting with a “clean slate” when designing the Critical Listening and Post-Production Studio, Snyder says RDL’s products were the obvious choice.
“We were excited by the RDL solution because of its Dante integration, which allowed for seamless connectivity between our 100% Dante room as well as the overall simplicity and ease of installation. We could find no other solution that would afford us the opportunity to run audio over standard Cat 6, which is tremendously easy to terminate compared to soldering endless connections. As we handled facility installation in-house, this ease of deployment was truly critical. Vintage King LA and RDL engineering support both proved tremendously valuable resources throughout the design phase and we’re thrilled with the end result.”
After conducting extensive research, Snyder says they discovered that RDL’s TP-HA1A allows independent monitoring and listening, which they had never seen. “Generally devices like that are completely analog/hardwired and we have to worry about grounding issues, so I love that FORMAT-A uses Standard Cat 6 and would be simple to deploy and repair in our large installation.”
The students at Ohio University are “overwhelmingly enthusiastic” about the system integrated within Schoonover Center, Snyder says, and the RDL headphone amplifiers have worked well because “they can live as just another Dante output on our network. Students can listen to work and hear us via talkback provided through the Nuage, which is fantastic, and we can carry on a ‘normal class.’ It’s a fantastic installation and an amazing product.”
The world of publishing is constantly changing, and in response to that change, OHIO Libraries is hosting a panel discussion on the benefits and challenges of open publishing.
Four OHIO faculty from the departments of math, political science, media arts and studies, and geological sciences will speak at the “Open in action: the practicalities and pitfalls” panel presentation, which will be held on Oct. 26 at 1 p.m. in Alden 319. The panel will give researchers and faculty the opportunity to hear from their colleagues who have successfully published open access resources and learn more about the value of open publishing.
The open access movement promotes access to academic research by freely disseminating ideas and information, often online.
“Under the current publication system, sometimes institutions can’t even afford to subscribe to the commercial journals in which their own researchers are published,” said Andrew Stuart, assistant head of reference.
Kelly Broughton, assistant dean for research and education services, said the world of publishing is quickly changing, and open access resources are a response to that change.
“Open access has the potential to change our broken scholarly publishing model—to remove the pay walls from the results of research funded by taxpayers and tuition,” Broughton said. “The only way to really accomplish this is for faculty to be open to new modes of scholarly communication and to test the impact of these modes.”
Jennifer Fredette, assistant professor of political science, will be speaking at the panel about her open licensed publication “Constructing Muslims in France: Discourse, Public Identity and the Politics of Citizenship,” which was published through the Temple University Press in 2014. The book is available for free online with a Creative Commons license through Knowledge Unlatched, an organization that works with libraries and publishers to make research more freely available.
“For me, as a scholar, open access is key for knowledge dissemination,” Fredette said. “It’s amazingly useful for me to be able to tell students, colleagues, and people I meet at conferences, ‘Oh yeah, you might want to read my book. It’s free; just Google my name.’ That’s an incredible resource.”
Martin Mohlenkamp, an associate professor of mathematics and another speaker on the panel, has both taught with open resources and co-authored an open access textbook. He has incorporated open resources into his teaching by having his students improve Wikipedia articles on math concepts as class assignments, and he uses the SageMath cloud computing environment in some of his courses. This software allows his students to collaborate with each other on the same programs, even if they are using different computers.
His book “Introduction to Numerical Methods and Matlab Programming for Engineers,” available free online, is used in the MATH 3600 Applied Numerical Methods course. He co-authored the book with Todd Young, who created the Math 3600 course and was able to customize the text for that class. One piece of advice that Mohlenkamp has for researchers who want to look into open publishing is “scratch your own itches.”
“Do something that you’re going to get value out of and you’re going to use so that your own dissatisfaction is fixed,” he said.
Daniel Hembree, associate professor of geological sciences and another panel speaker, serves as a handling editor for Palaeontologica Electronica, an open access journal. He said the journal’s online presence gives researchers the opportunity to include digital features such as animation in their articles, and the journal can also easily publish in full color. Having the journal online has also helped the content reach an international audience.
“There are no publishing costs associated with it. It’s a nice venue for getting research out and making it available globally,” Hembree said.
Kyle P. Snyder, a lecturer in media arts and studies and another panelist, authored the open access book “A Crash Course to Making Your Mark in the Recording Industry.” The publishers, Routledge and Focal Press, partnered with Creative Live to make the book open access, although readers have to provide an email address to download a copy. Snyder not only contributed his own writing but also reached out to other researchers in the field to contribute.
“My goal was to take what I thought was the best information that they had and make it free to audio engineers. If I wrote a basic book right now, what would I want my students to have access to?” he said.
Snyder is also chair of the education committee for the Audio Engineering Society, a professional society devoted to audio technology, and has worked with open publishing in that role.
The Libraries is holding the panel to celebrate Open Access Week, which will be held by SPARC Oct. 24-30 to encourage publishers and universities to increase access to open resources.
The panel is only one of many of the Libraries’ initiatives to increase awareness of open resources, such as the Alt-Textbook initiative, which helped students save money by encouraging faculty to use open access and Library resources rather than textbooks.
