Everybody | Huhao Yang Sound

Everybody

by Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins

2022-2023 Season Purdue Theatre Production
Directed by Sonita L. Surratt
Scenic Design by Charlie Calvert
Costume Design by Ari Casas
Lightning Design by Baxter Chambers
Sound Design by Grant Porter
Composition by Stephen Tsai
Sound Engineering by Huhao Yang
Technical Director: Vince Lobello
Opening Night: September 23, 2022

Everybody is a moral play with modern context, it is adapted from the medieval play "Everyman". The play makes abstract concepts related to every human individual, including death, friendship, love, and understanding, etc. to become concrete characters on stage. From the dialogue between the characters symbolizing "Everybody" and various concepts, audience will gradually start to think that when each human individual faces death, what things can accompany us to leave the reality and life. The play is contains sense of black humor, and various dreams, monologues and surreal scenes blend together, and formed a very unique theatre experience.

This production also takes the form of a special "lottery cast" in the performance every night. Several main characters including "Everybody" would be assigned to different actors by lottery on site, so every night the performances are random and different. And in order to increase the immersive experience of our production and enhance the audience's "subjective perspective", the production team also added seats on the stage close to the actors for observation, so more considerations have been added to the design and construction of the sound system for this show. According to the requirements of the sound designer, I lead the sound team built a comprehensive sound system that can both work for the stage audience and the house area, it assists the sound presentation very well.

Stage Speaker Systems

As the sound engineer, my main responsibility is to build the sound system, program the digital signal processing software, set the network control for our Dante audio transmission and complete the calibration for the system with the sound team members. The following are the reference files of the system, and the load-in and calibration schedules made by me, please download the specific files below to view.

Sound System

Speaker Plot

Section View

Qsys DSP Programming

For viewing specific documentation and more information please download the pdf files:

Everybody Sound System Drawings

Sound System
Load-in Schedule

Sound Calibration Plan

Special Engineering Challenge: Hallway Speakers

In this production, the sound designer added two sets of "Hallway Speakers". They are hung above the audience entering hallways into the theatre to play immersive environmental sound effects, so that the audience can feel the theatrical world we built for it when entering the hallway.

This is not a normal place to hang speakers in our theatre, so I needed to use the unistrut that was originally designed to hold the pipes at the top of the ceiling and custom made a batch of ceiling tiles and cut the appropriate holes to go through the suspension rods, not only for ensuring the fire safety but also makes the hallway ceilings look clean.

Ceiling Tiles Measurements

And due to the limitation of the speaker jack designed near the hallways, I need to output a set of stereo signals from an NL4 interface on the wall to supply the both left and right speakers, so I also made a Y-shaped cable with one end for NL4 and another end for two NL2 heads. Correspondingly, I also used a terminal block and changed the output routings on the amps.

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Finally, after a lot of efforts, I finally solved this challenge, and pioneered the practice of adding speakers in the hallways in our theatre, and at the same time left a deep impression on the audience when they entered the theatre.