A tale of two organisations
Digital developments are nudging two AV and pro audio organisations to jointly figure out the future. Dan Daley reports.
Question just about anyone in the installed-sound business and you’ll more than likely find that he began his career in a recording studio, or somewhere close to one.
In addition to indicating the prevailing gender of the sector, that statement also suggests people of a certain age.
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People in the AV business tend to be older. The trade association InfoComm says no one knows the average age for AV professionals, but the old guard that made the industry what it is today is greying.
Younger people may know what a recording studio looks like only because they saw a documentary showing rock musician Dave Grohl vainly trying to save one.
Even people working mostly on the video side often had their media technology interest piqued by music at an early age.
What attracted them by the thousand over several decades was the potential for a pay cheque at the end of each week in a music business that was awash with money. At the same time, long-term success was elusive for most of those who entered it.
So the ranks of AV are heavy with former music hounds, yet the industry continues to wring its hands about where subsequent generations are coming from.
“I don’t think anyone knows that AV can be a profession,” one commentator complained.
“We’re spread thin. We’re looking for new talent and we can’t find it.”
That’s similar to the problem faced by the Audio Engineering Society (AES).
The AES Show – the association’s congress and expo held each autumn in New York City, Los Angeles or San Francisco – has had some variation in attendance lately, but the long-term trend has been downward.
That’s partly because pro audio has been evolving into a black-box model; a digital proposition in which algorithms do more performing than the musicians or engineers controlling the devices. These range from Auto-Tune to iPhone pianos that play samples of a Bosendorfer recorded in the Sydney Opera House.
The annual AES conclaves grow more compact, while the organisation looks less like a lively meeting place and more like a musty academy.
That kind of academic sclerosis isn’t really a problem for InfoComm. It has a fairly robust educational component in its show, which bounces annually between Orlando and Las Vegas.
The AES conference side has improved in the last two years, in part because of a change in leadership but also because it has begun catering to a younger cohort.
(The long-entrenched old guard had been hit with allegations of financial malfeasance, sexual harassment and threats of litigation, which made it a better soap opera than an administration.)
Focusing on youth is good strategy, because music production tends to draw its ranks from those just out of secondary school.
The problem has been that AES gatherings – particularly the conference aspects – had for too long looked too much like TAFEs, ready to put budding musicians back into the lecture rooms they had left behind.
On the other hand, a sizeable part of InfoComm’s cohort will be people happy to be back at school, 10 or 15 years later, looking for the pay cheque that was so elusive in music.
So, AES gets them young but has largely failed to turn them into formal members of the pro audio industry; InfoComm is a second-career refuge for many of the same people.
Digital technology is prompting the convergence of AV and IT on the operational level. Could it do the same for pro audio on the perceptual level, creating the sense of a cohesive industry with many pathways?
Continuing education overlaps
We already see some overlap on the education side – the AES Show’s most recent curricula have added several rubrics that would not be out of place at an InfoComm gathering.
This year’s AES event, planned for 30 October in New York City, is especially geared towards ‘live sound’ engineers, who now make up about 25% of attendees according to AES. There’s an emphasis on practical applications of installed sound in theatres, music venues and houses of worship.
Key topics this year include how the changing state of wireless audio will affect professional users, how virtual sound checks and networked audio are combining to create a more efficient workflow, and the design and use of live sound consoles and microphones.
Tours of local facilities once focused exclusively on recording studios, but now attendees can sign up for ‘Broadway Day’, ‘House of Worship Sound/Fixed Install Day’ and ‘Tour Sound Day’. They peer into a wider range of pro audio factories of the sort that might whet young people’s curiosity but would never have otherwise cropped up.
On one level this is a reflection of the fact that most of the money in music now comes from live shows rather than recorded performances. But it also shows that the installed and touring AV sectors can be filled with younger people at an earlier stage in their careers.
It could also underscore the idea that transitioning from music production to installed AV is more like an inflection point than an ominous crossroads in a long career.
IT as bonding agent
The notion of a seamless career may become more deeply embedded as music production and AV move into greater convergence with IT.
AV systems integrators have been experiencing this transition (with all the attendant hand-wringing) for some time, as media moves towards a streaming model in areas such as video teleconferencing and collaboration.
That’s also what music production has been discovering. Distribution of music to consumers has left behind brick-and-mortar stores and downloaded files and is moving onto platforms such as Spotify and Beats. Music production now takes place in multiple locations, with files passing through the internet as various parties add parts, edit tracks, create mixes and polish with mastering.
A new category of products – from Audinate’s Dante networking platform to Focusrite’s RedNet series of networked audio interfaces – has arisen from this convergence. To properly wrangle media for music or live events, those working in the respective engine rooms need to acquire a shared knowledge base of layers, packetisation and V-LANs, along with a host of new acronyms such as QoS and SaaS.
As live music has grown in importance on the economic side, various schools specialising in music production degrees have added education modules for touring sound. A few have also begun including courses for installed AV.
They are doing this to remain competitive, of course, as the nature of the industry changes. In the process they are creating a true AV/IT university, thereby becoming a broader resource for a wider industry, a place where those looking at careers in music production also get to sample the bigger picture.
This might sound a bit ‘pie in the sky’, the idea of looking at pro audio as a much larger proposition. But it’s also a reasonable goal for industries that chronically complain of a shallow pool of new recruits or increasingly constricted opportunities for a living wage.
AES meet InfoComm and InfoComm say hello to AES. We’ll leave you two alone now.
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