Bau’s Blaug
The latest news from “the Big Cheese” - Executive Director Bau Graves.
What is a Schroeder Diffuser?
Plans for Old Town School’s new facility are continuing to evolve in interesting directions. The proposed building will feature a flex-use concert/dance hall, three spacious dance studios, and fourteen acoustically isolated music classrooms. It will incorporate environmentally-friendly “green” technology throughout, and will be wired to take advantage of 21st century electronic communications. And those are just the basics.
Extended planning meetings with every segment of the School community produced a wealth of insight into how our classrooms actually function. Those insights are being incorporated in dozens of design modifications that separate a good building from a great one. Things like: built-in computer terminals and sound cabinets in every classroom; ample in-room storage space for everything from hula hoops to djembes; walls laid out slightly off-parallel to eliminate reverberation; clerestory windows flooding dance studios with natural light; cubbies on the far side of the room so students can keep an eye on their stuff while they dance; and our very own Schroeder Diffuser.
A Schroeder Diffuser is a surface broken up into multiple, apparently-haphazard angled planes, employed by acousticians who need to “deaden” a room. You may have seen one in a recording studio or radio station. The wall essentially “soaks up” audio waves. Our architects at VOA Associates have designed an entire interior surface, from the ground to the roof, as one giant Schroeder Diffuser. The result should be a building safe for the random music-making that makes our School so welcoming but can often turn a normal conversation in the lobby into a shouting match. Imagine enjoying that jam session in the hall – and conducting business at the front desk, too! Coming soon to a School near you.
Floor plans and renderings of the building can be viewed in the admin suite or teachers’ lounge. Our window of opportunity for your great suggestions is still open. Thanks!
Filed under: Uncategorized by Bau | October 14, 2008 |
1 Comment so far
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Dear Bau:
In your last couple of Bau’s Blaugs you wrote about “folk arts organizations that could… raise (their) own funds independently” and reported that the new building …“will be wired to take advantage of 21st century electronic communications”. Here are a couple of ideas to leverage one to achieve the other, and some thoughts on a related issue …the ongoing replacement of the phone network with a broadband - digital multimedia network… a phenomenon known as digital convergence.
Ramp up your efforts to adapt OTS grasp of and use of ”21st century electronic communications” (digital convergence), to establish the OTS brand & export it nationally and globally.
• Webcast live concerts from the OTS auditorium.
• Record (audio & video) live concerts from the OTS auditorium & studios & make available for purchase (download or ship CD/DVD). OTS is a legitimate music venue. The sooner you start building a library of what will comprise future treasured musical documents (available for sale on the OTS label) the better. The more well known artists you feature (& it seems to me that you already feature some…as well as future well known artists), the more legitimacy & buzz you build into the OTS label. The reputation of the school and the particular niche it occupies make it a natural. I think you can build the OTS label into something substantial by increasing it’s visibility and reach via the web (I don’t see how you can without it).
• There is software that turns PC’s into guitar tuners, metronomes and chord finders etc., out on the web. You could license the best of this stuff, slap your brand on it and make it available on your website.
Expand OTS’ already great reputation by using the web to make more & better players faster by…
• Video taping classes and posting via web (password- protected for those students’ eyes only). This would extend the immersive 1.5 hour classroom experience for the 7 days until the next class. Students could refer to any portion of the class while practicing at home any time of the day or night. If you chose to, this idea could be expanded on to build a library of video lessons in the “The Old Town School Tradition” that could be used to export the OTS brand to the world.
• Posting video of the instructor playing a piece of music “properly” made available to the class via the web.
• Linking to commercially available versions of the songs being learned in class via iTunes (original hits and alternative). Referrals to commercial sites could generate revenue for OTS.
• Posting images of chord shapes (a chord library—a digital chord generator with audio!)
• Posting lead sheets
• Allowing anyone on the web to audit live OTS classes for a nominal fee or nothing more than their email addresses (which could then be used to expand OTS reach).
• Using those email addresses to build a web based e-business (on a drop-ship basis if you like) & establish OTS as THE source for music, music news, instruments, music books &/or individual sheet music (both paper based and downloaded), etc….all things music, whatever you like (whatever sells).
I took 5 or 6 guitar courses at OTS with Arlo Leach a year or so ago. Arlo developed an OTS related website called http://www.oldtownfolks.org/ (I’m sure you know). He’s got a couple of great utilities on the site. One is a lead sheet repository available to the OTS instructors to upload to…& in turn available to the OTS students to download from. (It makes it easy if you lose your lead sheet or didn’t make it to class.) The other is an index of the songs in the OTS songbook (1992 &2008 versions). Besides being indexed alphabetically you can sort the songbook by key, speed of chord changes, time signatures as well as sing-ability, & you can search for text and search for chords. This tool helps students use their OTS songbook to zero in on songs that focus on the skills they are learning in class. Arlo and I spoke at length about ideas like these back then. He tried to get hired on to your website group to move OTS in these directions…but no luck. Finally he did his own (on a shoestring). Arlo gets this stuff.
These ideas don’t even scratch the surface of the ways multimedia information technology & communications is (on an exponentially increasing basis), used to make, teach, learn, enjoy, communicate about & sell music. Although somewhat late to the game (check out some of the existing music resources on the web), I think OTS’ sterling reputation and unique niche give it the sway to wade into this thing and establish a presence.
Imagine OTS fortunes had it not located near electric, phones, roads, potable water or sewers (all utilities we take for granted and can’t imagine doing without). I believe that businesses (& artists), that deal with mediums that can be digitized (like music) must now grapple with the question of how to adapt to the profound changes taking place with the communications utility (the shift from telephones (voice) to computers (multimedia)- called digital convergence), simply to survive. Growth & prosperity in the face of uncertain cultural tastes and government grants (not to mention the rising cost of everything), may be about how early and how well they adapt.
I would be happy to discuss this with you at greater length.
Sincerely:
ARTHUR TURSH
Senior Telecom Projects and Systems Engineer,
Telecommunications
CME Group
A CME/Chicago Board of Trade/NYMEX Company
20 South Wacker Drive
Chicago, Illinois 60606
www.cmegroup.com