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How Harman has revolutionised the effect of Music
Highlights
HARMAN designs and engineers connected products and solutions for consumers, automakers and enterprises worldwide, including audio, visual and infotainment systems; enterprise automation solutions; and software services. The company has four key divisions – Infotainment, Lifestyle Audio, Services, and Professional Solutions.
•A brief about the work that HARMAN is doing in the audio domain
HARMAN designs and engineers connected products and solutions for consumers, automakers and enterprises worldwide, including audio, visual and infotainment systems; enterprise automation solutions; and software services. The company has four key divisions – Infotainment, Lifestyle Audio, Services, and Professional Solutions.
HARMAN’s Professional Solutions:
HARMAN leads the world in the design and manufacture of professional audio, lighting, video and control systems. HARMAN brands bring you to your feet at a rock concert, or to the edge of your seat in a movie theater. It’s how audio professionals have been working with sound, and how the rest of us have been hearing it, for more than 50 years. In India, HARMAN’s solutions can be found in leading multiplex cinemas such as PVR & Inox, leading music festivals like NH7 and Sunburn, top tier hotels and entertainment venues like Kingdom of Dreams, studios like Yash Raj Films, broadcast studios like All India Radio stations, ETV, Zee TV etc.
•How has the live music industry evolved over the years?
A decade ago, the live music industry in India was very nascent. You had some jazz acts in cities like Mumbai and just a handful of Independent (Indie) bands like Parikrama and Euphoria. Over the years the entertainment industry in India has undergone a massive change. Live music has gained a lot of prominence. This can be attributed to a number of interconnected factors. The indie music scene has really taken off and there are a lot of concerts, music festivals and venues that promote live music. In fact, live music is becoming one of the main sources of revenue for musicians. There are also many more avenues in the country for formal training in music / audio engineering now compared to some years ago. We’re seeing a huge influx of top international artists as well, who consider India a big market for their music.
•How is studio/recorded sound different from live sound?
There are two things you can do with audio. You can either reproduce audio or you can reinforce it. When an artist goes into a recording studio and records his music, apart from him and the studio engineer, nobody’s really heard it. So you have the option to reproduce the entire thing. If it doesn’t sound right you can re-record it or you can tweak it up with DSPs, you can play around with computersand make it sound totally different. In live sound what you do is you reinforce audio. When an artist is playing on stage, some people are going to hear the sound as it is on the stage, so when you reinforce it just has to be a louder and slightly cleaner version of that. With live sound you have just that one chance to make an impression. You can’t process the audio too much because people will hear the difference in time. They will hear the artist play first and then hear the processed version later because of delay in processing. The other difference is when you reinforce audio you need to localize the sound to the artist and to the stage. So when you design a system, it’s got to be in a way that the sound is coming from the stage or artist rather than from behind or around you. So you can’t really do surround sound and the kind of things you could do with recorded sound.
•What are the factors that go into making a live concert a success from an audio perspective?
There are two aspects to this - one is what the artist wants on stage and the second is what the artist wants for the audience in the venue. They are both looked at differently. For most live concerts you would have three distinct engineers. There is what we call a Monitor Engineer or the person who mixes audio for individual artists or musicians on the stage. Each musician either wears monitors in their ear (like earphones or headphones) or then they have individual speakers on the floor. What they want to listen in there is totally different from what you as an audience would hear. They might just want to listen to one particular instrument, maybe a click track or something to lock onto the tempo, and they want to listen to a lot of themselves so they know how they’re performing. So each of them will have what is called an individual mix. The monitor engineer who’s on stage only looks into that. You then have what you call a Front of House engineer (FOH). This person concentrates on mixing audio only for the audience. So what he does is what you would typically hear on a CD or on a record. Then you have a third engineer who is called a systems engineer. A systems engineer’s job is to ensure that all the equipment (mostly the loudspeaker system) is designed to be adequate for the venue, to suit the style of music, and so that every seat in the house has roughly the same type of audio output coming to their seat. The most important thingis you need to spend enough time with the artist to ensure that you understand what he expects of the concert. Different types of concerts have different requirements. For example, your venue could be an intimate indoor auditorium or a large open aired stadium. The type of music could range from soft to upbeat. The environment as well as the kind of experience the artist wants to create for the audience is usually pre-defined. Based on this information, the loudspeaker systems for a live show are designed a certain way.
•How sound can be ‘shaped’ to suit ones requirement?
What’s happening increasingly with music festivals and with events is that noise pollution is becoming a very big consideration. In the West especially, there are major concerns of how you can contain sound within performance limits. It’s very difficult to build walls for a temporary solution. But what we do now is we have ways to control sound within a limit by processing the audio in a certain way or by using loudspeaker configurations that ensure you have a lot of directivity. For the past 15 yrs or so we’ve been using line arrays which typically contain the audio in a fixed vertical spread by virtue of the length of the loudspeaker system. But what we’ve also doing increasingly over the last few years in India and the world over is that we’ve started to use what is known as cardioid subwoofers. Subwoofers by default send sound in every direction because of their physical property, so even if you’re really far away from the stage you can hear the thumping bass. With cardioids subwoofers you can prevent this from happening. Through signal processing you can create a typical shape and then you delay individual loudspeakers so as to ensure the sound stays within that shape. For example at NH7 Delhi they’ve been following a circular theme for the last two years where in the middle of the venue you have a large flea market and you have three stages at each end. Which such a venue it would get really difficult if you don’t use cardioid subwoofers as you cannot contain the sound. Anyone who is in the market will get bombarded by bass from three stages and that would be a veryunpleasant experience. Sunburn is also similar because the location is such that behind the stage there are villages and residences, so you have to follow the same process to prevent energy from going behind the stage and this is extremely effective in containing the sound.
•The concept of a ‘Tech Rider’ along with the elements of a Good Live Sound Tech Rider
A Technical Rider is the way an audio/systems engineer wants to design a particular event. It specifies all the technical aspects of the event including – audio, lighting, special effects, pyro (fire effects), video etc. But generally speaking a technical rider is more to do with audio. It will specify the kind of loudspeaker system you want, the kind of brands you’re comfortable with, the mixing consoles you want to use, the cabling systems, the control systems etc. Once this list comes in from the artist’s team, the event organizer needs to ensure that everything that is asked for on that list is provided for.
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