ATC monitors were chosen for the four main studios in Chicago's esteemed Columbia College. Doug Jones (left) Chair of the Columbia College Department of Audio Arts and Brett Johnson, Chief Engineer and Systems Designer for the new facility. "Teach no equipment-specific skills." CHICAGO, ILLINOIS: Douglas Jones, Chair of the Columbia College Department of Audio Arts & Acoustics in Chicago, chooses his words very deliberately when describing the program's educational philosophy. He is careful to avoid the rhetorical noise of a "mission statement" yet doesn't shy away from delivering a highly compressed positioning line if he has to. "We take the distinction between education and training quite seriously," he says. "We don't teach software. We don't train students how to use equipment. We view ourselves as educating the next generation of professional sound people." Whereas most audio programs are part of a music department, Audio Arts & Acoustics (AA&A) is an independent academic unit. In the early 90s, the fledgling program moved into a defunct recording facility three miles north of the campus. Since the Spring of 2003, AA&A's home has been a newly built facility at 33 East Congress Parkway, a few blocks northwest of college's main campus building. AA&A students graduate with a B.A. and can pursue studies in five areas of concentration: Music Recording, Acoustics, Live Sound Reinforcement, Audio for Visual Media, and Sound System Contracting. AA&A's studio, lab, and recording spaces offer everything a student could want. Jones calls it, "a dream facility." Its teaching spaces - four main control rooms, recording studios, and seven lab/classrooms - are all connected over two internal networks which include one for file sharing, and the other for digital audio and video. Though the program focus is decidedly not on gear or training, equipment and software, API, Midas, Neve, Martin, Lexicon, Pro Tools, ATC monitors, are essential classroom teaching tools. ("We don't teach a class in Pro Tools, but we do teach digital audio editing," says Jones. "And we use Pro Tools.") The most recent addition to the facility's long list of equipment are monitor packages from ATC (Acoustic Transducer Company, located in the UK) in the complex's four main studios. In Studio D equipment includes a 5.1 surround sound far-field monitoring system comprised of SCM20ASL Pro two-way active monitors; Studio C utilizes a pair of SCM50ASL Pro three-way active monitors. And Studios A and B each include a pair of SCM50ASLs. In addition, four "mini" studios are also outfitted with stereo pairs of ATC SMC10ASL Pro two-way near field monitors. The decision to make ATC monitoring the "backbone and common denominator" as Jones put it, of the multi-room teaching facility, took place over a long evaluation period, culminating in six months of auditioning the ATCs against other prime candidates by faculty, staff, and students. "Our goal was to find speakers that met both our objective and subjective criteria... that is, speakers that measured well, and were also enjoyable to listen to. Brand name wasn't an issue for us as we had no clientele we needed to impress." The ATCs met these criteria and, Jones adds, provide a, "consistency of sound across the range... Of course, the different models sound different, but each exhibits similar sonic characteristics and quality." Monitors from other manufacturers share space in their control rooms - a total of five different loudspeaker systems in the "teaching control room" (Studio C) alone. But, says Jones, that's part of the point of a teaching facility. Monitoring options allow students to compare mixes. Among the features of this unusually comprehensive academic program is that all AA&A majors take required general studies courses in math and science dealing with the physiology of hearing and psycho-acoustics, and electronics, in addition to departmental core courses. "We offer courses in acoustic modeling as well," says Jones. But, as might be expected, course work does not concentrate on the use of specific modeling software. "We give our students the end-to-end experience of modeling a system, installing it, measuring the system, then going back to compare their measurements to the original design." The acoustics concentration ("my favorite" says Jones) covers architectural acoustics, environmental noise impact, and mechanical vibration studies (as a predictor of failure modes in machinery). "A few years ago, some of our students conducted a pioneering study of noise levels in the CTA [Chicago Transit Authority]," says Jones. "Currently we're involved in an interesting study of noise levels in nightclubs as they affect employees." And last, but not least, in an abbreviated list of highlights, is the facility's reverb chamber. Encased in three-foot wide, 3/4" thick steel-plate walls with a massive circular door, the chamber was formerly a bank vault. "We found it when we were first surveying the site," says Jones. "Our first thought was, 'What are we going to do with this?' Then we found it had a natural reverb time of six seconds. So it became our reverb lab." Students go through a module where they have to create reverb sounds using the chamber. "Here's a closet full of acoustic treatment, some mics, some loudspeakers, and a room... now, create your sound," says Jones. The point of all this fits neatly into the program's educational philosophy. "We want students to use their ears first," says Jones. "Instead of scrolling through a menu and picking a sexy sounding name for a reverb effect, we want them to make audio decisions based, not on what they see in a software program but, on what they hear." |
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