As I mentioned earlier, I am on sabbatical right now. It’s pretty great. Along with the sabbatical comes a “commitment,” of sorts, to work on a large-scale project. This is the reason the college is giving me this time off; the project is meant to be their “return on investment” in giving me this semester off. In order to be granted a sabbatical, one must submit an application outlining all of the reasons why you need one, with the titular “project” being the main point of why you need the time off.
To be perfectly honest, I just wanted/needed the break that comes with a sabbatical, so I was willing to put forward whatever proposal would get me there. Before applying, I didn’t have some grand plan of something I had always wanted to work on, some book to write, or some groundbreaking research I was dying to put forth. Other than being totally burnt out, I didn’t have an aching-in-my-bones reason for needing a sabbatical. (Which isn’t to say that feeling burnt out isn’t a good enough reason, or something I wasn’t feeling in my bones … All I mean is that I wasn’t feeling an itch to work on some big project. My reason(s) for wanting/needing a sabbatical were purely because I was starting to hate my job (and, by extension, everyone/everything).)
(Automatic) Music Technology (for the People)
One of my main teaching responsibilities is (usually) to teach a sequence of courses on music technology. And, in this realm, I am always trying make my class(es) about getting students comfortable with working with music tech in realistic, down-to-earth ways. Sure, it’s kind of cool to get your hands on a $10,000 microphone or a studio worth $500,000, but that’s not a realistic scenario for the overwhelming majority of us. Most of us will, when we get the chance at all, probably have access to much more modest setups; we’ll use “recording studios” in bedrooms and garages and we’ll use $200 and $300 mics. Thus, educationally, I try to present the technology and its capabilities through this framework … something that you really can “do yourself.”
With this thinking in mind, I set down to make a sabbatical proposal toward this end. (Because, again, I really needed this sabbatical for personal, mental health reasons, and the only way to get one is to convince the committee that your project is something worth supporting.)
Impulse Responses (for the People)
One of the cooler directions music technology has taken over the past few years is the development of what is essentially a create-your-own plugins scheme. One of these new-fangled DIY abilities in music tech revolves around a pretty complex process called a “convolution reverb” which uses some tech called an “impulse response.” Without going into a bunch of unnecessary detail, these convolution reverbs and impulse responses are a way of digitally recreating actual acoustical spaces. Think of the big echo from inside Notre Dame Cathedral and using computer algorithms to measure and capture the ways sound bounces around inside the cathedral, then translating that information into a computer plugin; theoretically, you could then make someone’s bedroom recording sound like it was made inside Notre Dame … no trip to Paris required.
Creating an impulse response file is actually really easy. It doesn’t take that much equipment or time.
So, I decided to commit to creating a series of impulse responses / reverb plugins for my sabbatical project. I have basically three goals:
Get approval by the Sabbatical Leave Committee (✔)
Create a series of detailed impulse responses compiled into a library
Use this experience to add a section to my music tech class(es) on creating your own impulse responses / reverb plugins
It might all sound kind of complicated, but I assure you it’s actually pretty simple. I don’t expect the actual creation of these “plugins” to take more than a few hours each. I committed to make eight of these plugins, so none of this will take much more than a week’s worth of work at the most. (Don’t tell the college that my I-need-an-entire-semester-to-do-this project might really only take a few days.)
So, at some point in the next year, you’ll probably hear from me again telling you about where you can find these new-fangled sabbatical-funding-supported reverb plugins. But, I am not in a very big hurry to get started. At the moment—still less than a month into this sabbatical—I am just enjoying the time I have to decompress for a bit.