last concert by Vincent H. '23

my last concert with the mit ohms, my a cappella group, happened around two weeks ago

usually we hire a sound company to handle sound on the day of the concert – they bring in their own equipment, set it up, do live mixing during the concert, and then tear down their equipment afterwards. this semester our sound company canceled four days before the concert, and four days isn’t enough notice to book another company so we proceeded without a typical sound company and did everything ourselves

we spent the days before the concert contacting as many music-adjacent mit groups as possible to borrow equipment from them. ultimately we ended up getting: 5 wired mics, a mixer, an amp, and 2 speakers + speaker stands from av; 8 wireless mics, a speaker, and a mixer from next sing; 16 wireless mics from mtg; 10 wireless mics and a mixer from synco. this was a bit overkill since our group only had 13 members total, but it was the right choice because we didn’t know which groups would respond in time and weren’t sure about equipment quality or cross-compatibility between different sets of mics, mixers, and speakers so the safe bet was to acquire as much as possible

the day before the concert we did a quick sound test and confirmed the equipment from synco and mtg wouldn’t work with our speakers. then i built my first sound system, connecting the 5 av mics to the av mixer to the amp to the speakers, and it worked! it was cool to actually figure out how to put everything together myself, after having relied on external sound companies to blackbox away all the details for the first three years of my time in college

of course 5 mics wasn’t enough, so we also set up the 8 next sing mics + mixer + speaker, giving us the 13 mics we needed. for a while we thought we’d need to run the av and next sing sound systems in parallel, and have someone manage both mixers separately during the concert, which would’ve been painful and would have resulted in very limited mixing and weird audio imbalances because people sitting in different locations would hear different mixes. then i had the idea of setting up the systems in series instead of in parallel, with the 8 next sing mics feeding into the next sing mixer and the mixer output feeding into the av mixer as a single input. this would still require managing two separate mixers, but would solve the audio imbalance problem because all 13 mics would output through the same set of speakers

we tried this and it worked! except it turned out the next sing mics were quite noisy and the next sing mixer was not powerful enough to remove the static, so that wasn’t ideal either. then we realized there was another sound company in cambridge that we could borrow 13 wireless mics + a compatible mixer from, so we acquired those the night before the concert

the day of the concert i arrived six hours early with some alumni to set up the new equipment. our final setup had the 13 wireless mics feeding into the new mixer, feeding into the av amp and speakers, as well as an extra output into the next sing speaker to serve as a monitor during the concert (a monitor is a speaker pointed at the performers instead of the audience, so that they can hear themselves). i thought it was cool that our final setup combined equipment from three different systems, and it fun to talk through the optimal locations to place the speakers and cables and other equipment; i think i got better at event planning in the process

i won’t say much about the actual concert other than that it went fine and a decent number of people showed up and i was exhausted by the end because i’d essentially been in the same room from 8am to 8pm for setup, rehearsal, performance, and teardown. ohms time commitment the week of concerts is usually 15-20 hours but this time i think it was closer to 35-40 for me because of all the equipment logistics we had to deal with

afterwards it took me a few days to process that i was done with a cappella for at least the foreseeable future and probably done with south asian fusion music for life. i didn’t want it to stop, but we didn’t have any more activities planned, so i started writing – thoughts on publicity and organization, commentary on all the arrangements and all the music i’ve ever written, pages and pages of documentation which nobody asked for but which i wrote anyway because there was nothing else left for me to do

one of my favorite videos is a behind-the-scenes clip about the filming of the lord of the rings trilogy. in the video, peter jackson (the director) is shooting the last scene involving elijah wood (who plays frodo, the protagonist). peter gets the shot he wanted but continues asking for more takes because he’s not ready to say goodbye to elijah yet, and then at the end he breaks down and thanks elijah repeatedly

all of which is to say that i have no idea what to do with my interest in music now that i’m no longer in the ohms. maybe get into composition or music production? experiment with interactive music systems and text-to-music conversions? i expect to continue making music in the future, but probably of a very different nature than what i have done in the past and i have no idea what that will entail