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Professor Huntington’s Sound Work Is Music to Audiences and Students’ Ears
Professor Huntington setting up at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival Drive-In.
If anyone knows good sound from bad, it’s John Huntington, professor of entertainment technology at New York City College of Technology (City Tech).
Huntington has designed sound systems for radically different types of productions, from the Metropolitan Opera to small off-off Broadway theatre productions. One of his favorite recurring gigs is the Tribeca Film Festival Drive-In, a three-night waterside cinema-under-the-stars event at Manhattan’s southern tip, which will take place April 23-25.
“Installing the sound system for the Drive-In takes 18 to 20 hours with a crew of seven,” says Huntington, who has done the show since 2004. “It uses nearly 50 professional loudspeakers, a $50,000-$60,000 console with 48 channels, a rack of digital processing equipment, wireless mics and a large inflatable screen.”
Last spring, for the Fragrance Foundation’s Fifi Awards (the Oscars of the fragrance world), held in the cavernous Park Avenue Armory, he had two weeks to design the setup. “The Armory was curtained into two spaces,” he explains, “so we needed two massive sound systems, separate but interrelated, with different functions. Intelligibility is important at an awards show, for the speeches; the other area required background music for dinner.” His solution: roughly 50 speakers distributed across the overhead rigging system, weighing thousands of pounds.
Comparing the challenges of each project, he says, “In some ways, it’s easier doing sound outside, because there are less sound reflections and reverb, but it’s also harder because humidity and temperature affect the speed and transmission of sound, especially in the mid-range, and it’s hard to compensate for that.”
It’s also hard to compensate for Mother Nature. At one Drive-In, “A freak windstorm came, and the forklifts holding up the speakers ripped through the screen -- that’s an expensive repair,” Huntington notes. “You just don’t know what’s going to happen when you’re outside. Something’s going to go wrong; that’s the nature of a live show.”
Indoor shows can be just as unpredictable. In the mid-1980s he and his colleagues at Associates and Ferren created a massive projector for Pink Floyd and Roger Waters’ arena tours. “We used a 35 mm movie theatre projector, modified it to be computer-controlled and synchronized to the sound tracks, and hoisted it with chain motors. One night during hoisting, the line broke and the projector ripped through the screen," he says.
Massive show set-ups like those are light years away from Huntington’s first “gigs” as a boy in Eastern Shore, Maryland. “I’ve been working backstage since the eighth grade. While everybody else wanted to be onstage, I was backstage doing sound effects for the school play. I also built a lighting system for my brother’s band -- I just read some books on it, looked at pictures, and figured it out.”
After graduating Ithaca College and Yale School of Drama, Huntington, now a Windsor Terrace resident, began adapting technology from other industries, figuring out how to apply it, because, he says, “Our industry can’t afford a lot of low-level research and development, but we are experts at applying technologies in very difficult environments.” His work culminated in a book, Control Systems for Live Entertainment (Focal Press, 1994), now in its third edition, the first work on this topic and still the leading book in the field.
Happily, the industry has evolved -- a big change, he says, “from being wacky people who just wanted to do a show. We’re still a bunch of wacky, driven and dedicated people, but now there are more of us, the stakes are higher, it’s more serious and it’s an industry. This used to be something you did until you figured out how to get a real job!”
City Tech students are well-prepared for the growing job market in live entertainment technology. Enrollment in the College's entertainment technology courses has increased by more than a third in two years, and the department’s ongoing equipment and facility upgrades provide a high-tech teaching environment.
Huntington developed from scratch many of the courses he teaches, because, he explains, “Most of what I teach wasn’t taught to me in college.” His 2004 article, Rethinking Entertainment Technology Education, won the U.S. Institute for Theatre Technology's Herbert D. Greggs Merit Award. And in 2005, he was appointed by the Entertainment Services & Technology Association’s Entertainment Technician Certification Program as one of 12 experts to create a new certification test for entertainment electricians.
Besides his full teaching schedule at City Tech and his spring course at Yale, Huntington has given master classes, workshops, presentations, papers and talks at conferences and trade shows throughout the U.S. He also maintains his consulting business, Zircon Designs, which has sound-designed more than 20 productions in New York City and for regional theatres and corporate events. He also recently consulted on Radio City Music Hall’s Christmas show, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Annex NYC and several museum projects.
Huntington’s high standards have incited a cyber-storm on his www.controlgeek.net blog, where he decried the poor sound at many live shows and offered a Concert Goers’ Bill of Rights. “If you're in the audience at a concert -- rock, rap, classical, you should be able to understand the words and hear clearly every instrument or sound source on stage,” he declares. “You should not have to endure painful levels or have your hearing damaged. And you should get decent sound no matter where you are sitting or standing,” he says.
Undoubtedly, that declaration is music to audiences' ears.
04.14.09
