UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS HOOKS BAG END
FOR ELECTRONIC MUSIC STUDIOS

The descriptive phrase ‘cutting edge’ is such an over-used and over-done cliché that it hardly has meaning any more. But if there ever was a real ‘cutting edge’, it is located in the Electronic Music Studios in the School of Music at the University of Texas.

The university's School of Music boasts some of the most extensive and technologically advanced electronic music studios in the United States. The director of the university's Electronic Music Studios, Dr. Russell Pinkston, is a noted composer, teacher, and researcher, whose recent experiments in the use of interactive technologies for dance have received international attention.

Dr. Pinkston directs an annual concert series staged by The University of Texas Electronic Music Studios (UTEMS) called EARS - an acronym for Electro-Acoustic Recital Series. The EARS concerts feature original pieces developed by students and faculty at UTEMS, as well as outstanding electro-acoustical pieces from all over the world.

“We don't just play original material,” Dr. Pinkston said, “And we don't just play pieces composed for stereo tape or CD playback. We have some pieces that involve live interactive electronic music. Sometimes we mix traditional instruments with pre-recorded sound. And sometimes we process the sound coming off an acoustic instrument and use that as part of a composition.”

“In our concerts we follow the European model of sound diffusion,” he said. “That is to say, sometimes we play back pre-recorded electronic sounds, but not just through a pair of loudspeakers on the front of the stage. We play it through multiple speakers in a multi-channel playback system and the composers of the pieces will actually sit at the mixing console as the pieces are playing and move the sound to the various speakers, so it becomes a live performance. It's not like we just put on a CD and everybody sits back and listens to it in a darkened room. Instead, with some creative live mixing, there can be quite dramatic acoustical effects you can get out of these sound diffusion systems.”

Dr. Pinkston first heard BAG END loudspeaker systems several years ago when he attended a Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS) conference at San Jose State University - and he was impressed. “Everyone liked the system,” he said. “Then, at the same conference a few years later at Birmingham Southern University, they used a BAG END system again, and we liked it again, so we then purchased a BAG END system for our studio.”

The system acquired for the UTEMS studios consists of eight 12-inch BAG END TA2000 speakers and two BAG END D18-E dual 18-inch subwoofers, controlled by a BAG END ELF signal processor. The system is powered by Crown K1 and K2 amps and mixed through a Mackie Digital 8-bus mixer.

“The system sounds fantastic,” Dr. Pinkston said. “We are really very pleased with it. The way we configure the speakers for our concerts is we put two 12-inch speakers on the front of the stage, left and right, and then we fly two of them over the stage on a bar, left and right,” He said. “Then we usually put two of them on the sides of the balcony and two in the back corners of the space. We put the subwoofers at the front of the stage, left and right, although it doesn't really matter where you put the subs.”

“With that arrangement of the 12-inch speakers we get excellent diffusion in the hall - and some sense of three-dimensional sound because, after all, the two speakers in the upper balcony on the sides and the two speakers flown over the stage give us that element of height. So, literally, you can move sounds all around the room in a circle and also move them overhead. It can be very effective,” he said. “We use portions of the system in concerts and recitals at the School of Music throughout the year, but we always use the full system in our own concert series, called EARS (Electro-Acoustic Recital Series), which is usually held at the end of the fall semester,” he added. Dr. Pinkston said that, typically in the spring the studios do a collaborative concert with the dance department, called ‘EARS and FEET.’

“With the EARS and FEET concert we use our multi-channel sound diffusion system and we also add theatrical lighting, costumes, etc.,” he said. “It's a full-fledged dance concert, but it's also a multi-media event with a major emphasis on music and sound design. We make sure that the sound is exquisite, the lighting and production as professional as possible, and that the composers and choreographers have equal billing.”

In the fall, UTEMS holds a concert in a room originally called the Opera Lab Theater, now named the McCullough Theatre. It is designed to put on opera scenes or small operas. It has a half fly space, designed for theater but without a full fly space that a major stage should have. It is a fairly symmetrical room and has wonderful acoustics. “It's not overly reverberant and it has a pretty flat frequency response, so we don't have to do any room EQing,” Dr. Pinkston said.

UTEMS holds a spring concert each year in the B. Iden Payne Theatre, a larger hall in the Department of Theatre and Dance. “It has a full fly space and that's where we do the spring concert," he said. “We hope to add some additional speakers at some point, although the eight we have fill the hall quite well. This year, everything really sounded great, and I have received numerous compliments on the new system.”

“What we particularly like about the BAG END systems for what we do is the fact that they can handle the extremely diverse and unusual kinds of sounds we make,” Dr. Pinkston said. “Many of our pieces have very wide, dynamic ranges, sudden changes, sharp transients, and an extremely broad frequency spectrum. We generate some exceedingly low sounds and the BAG END subwoofers are famous for accurate reproduction of extremely low frequencies, down to 10 Hz. So the low notes in particular sound absolutely fantastic on this system. And the TA2000s also have excellent high frequency response.

“One of the things about good electronic music is it really takes advantage of the full frequency spectrum,” Dr. Pinkston said. “You have very low sounds but you also have very high crisp metallic and percussive sounds - and everything in the middle. With this particular configuration of speakers we get a really nice, flat, full-range, full-frequency response with adequate sound pressure levels. We are running the Crown amps at 30-40 percent and they are plenty loud.”

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