Chapter 2

"Bring 'em in," I said. "I wonder how the new rigs are going to work. Video's a lot of bandwidth to add." My latest iteration of the individual sensor heads included tiny, almost state of the art 'lipstick' cameras.

"We'll see. I ran the calcs and we should be close. If we bog down, then we can shut down some of the video channels."

"Yeah, but you have to do that in the set-up or in real-time."

"Let's play with it," he said. "Bob, you can bring on the herd."

Bob laughed. "Don't let 'em hear you say that. They think they're an orchestra. Who knows, in a couple of months, they will be. Right now they're just twenty-odd bits of varying talent levels."

He opened the door and the musicians filed in against the wall, opening cases and assembling instruments, then took their places and started arranging sheet music.

"Okay, gang," Bob said from the conductor's podium. "You see that we've got some recording equipment in front of you. It's like this. A couple of engineers are developing a fast multichannel recording system using off the shelf technology so it'll be affordable. I offered them the use of YOU for guinea pigs in return for copies of any useful records they might obtain. Of course, that falls on YOU to produce useful sounds."

He motioned us forward. "This is Edward Stumff, Eddie, and this is Randall Jackson, Stoney, like in Stonewall. They're engineers with an "Idea" like engineers get from time to time." He turned to Eddie. "You have the conn, cap'n."

Eddie stepped up onto the podium. "Okay folks, here's the deal. In front of each of you is a sensor head. It does a bang-up job of sound recording, and Stoney has added video to see how that works. Each sensor goes to a separate digital file and all the files are time-stamped and coordinated. At the end of the recording session, we have a master, from this tall stand up here in front, and we have a track with the sound and video from each of the other stations.

One of the orchestra members raised a hand.

"A question?"

"Yessir," the young man said. "Your system, don't the mikes get too much bleedover from the nearby instruments to do individual channels?"

Eddie turned to me. "Stoney, you're the hardware guy. Take that?"

"Sure," I said. "The mikes are very directional. I took an off the shelf direction mike and added a sleeve to make it a little more directional. So don't worry about your neighbor harshing your style."

Laughs and giggles.

Eddie started again. "Okay, now we've tested this setup on a smaller scale with a garage rock band, but this is our first test with this many channels. And the dynamic range is different for an orchestra."

"No shit!" came a sotto voce comment.

"Yeah, I know that's obvious and YOU know that's obvious, but the magic boxes don't know, so the first thing we have to do is go around to each sensor and get you to play a little bit to get our levels straight on the setup."

That hand went up again. "Are your mikes frequency dependent?"

My question again. "They're good from outside the human audibility range and they're essentially flat across that range. If we need to filter anything, that's in Eddie's magic box, mostly software. Digital signal processing technology is making huge leaps. That's part of what we base this setup on. So we can do piccolo to contrabass with the same sensors. Any other questions on the hardware?"

No more questions. We got started. Eddie sat on a stool behind his HUGE monitor with a headset on. I had a headset too, so we could communicate without shouting across the studio.

I went to work, going to each player in turn, asking for a little sample. First violin.

"Just give me a few seconds of something," I said.

This was a guy. Serious-looking. Bushy brown hair. "My choice?"

"Yep."

He played a passage.

I tapped my headset. "Got that, Eddie?"

"Got it."

I went to the next one, and the next, back into the orchestra.

And deep in the middle, I came to the woodwinds. And a flute is a woodwind. And in this orchestra, the flute was in the hands of a striking creature, blue-eyed, redheaded, and not 'almost' red hair, but fire-red. And an alabaster complexion. And prominent freckles. And a smile.

"Your turn," I said.

She smiled, put the instrument to her lips, and trilling, bouncing, lifting. She released the last flying note and lowered her flute.

"That's cheating," I said.

"What's cheating?" she asked.

"You're playing a flute, young lady. And that's a passage out of a Mozart clarinet concerto. What, transposed a third up?"

To her left was a black girl with an oboe. "He got you there, Jo."

'Jo'. Now I had a name.

"So Mister Stoney, you want another one?"

"You want another?" I asked Eddie.

"Sure," he said. "But we got a lot to do."

"Okay, Miss Jo, let 'er rip."

The blue eyes, the smile, the flute came up and another happy, lilting piece. "Better?"

"Yes ma'am," I said. "Flute passage from the first movement of Beethoven's Seventh."

She was smiling, but I felt her gaze burning on my facial scar. "Since when do engineers know music like this?"

"Long story," I said.

Moving to the oboe player next to Jo, I said, "Your turn." I felt fingers tap my shoulder. I turned.

"Stoney, what do you call this setup you guys have?"

"Eddie calls it the Albigensian." I figured that word would be enough to get an 'Ohhhh".

I got instead, a giggle. "Kill them all, God will know his own."

I smiled. "Or as we used to say in my misspent youth, "Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out. We collect everything and let the editors work out who comes forth and when."

She smiled.

"Okay, Miss oboe, let's do it."

I finished my task. Bob took the podium and they began playing, practicing, working. I pulled up a spare chair and watched over Eddie's shoulder. The big monitor came in handy. He could pull up both video and sound graphics on any one of the various sensor heads.

"Here's your flute player," he said.

I watched.

"She doesn't stop smiling. Watch."

I watched. When her flute left her lips, the corners of her mouth turned up in a smile and it wasn't contrived. Her eyes went with it. When she played, the smile was still there, hidden a bit by the instrument. And in the flash of a moment, they got to a rest in the music, she pulled her flute away from her lips, went back to her smile and looked directly into the camera.

We got a treat that session, too. There was a trumpeter, a young man named David who was selected to do a solo piece, in his case a Haydn concerto, and to my pleasant surprise, my redheaded flautist was also a featured soloist. She chose a Quantz concerto.

After the session ended, we got help in putting away the equipment from several students and questions from many more. Eddie was off discussing scheduling with Bob and I was looking at some of the recordings. I felt a soft tap on my shoulder.

"Hi, Mister Stoney." I turned to find myself eye to eye with Jo.

"Just plain 'Stoney', please."

"Okay, Stoney, then. Did you get anything good?"

"Got everything, good, bad or indifferent," I said. "Wanna see YOU?"

"I'm almost afraid to look," she said. "I don't know how I turn out on camera."

"They're pretty good cameras, so you turn out just like real life."

She smiled. "Then let's look."

With a click of the mouse, I pulled up her channel. "There!"

Another smile. "Maybe not too bad. What's it sound like?"

"Put these headphones on. We don't want to disturb people."

She looked charming in headphones, like some high-tech angel. I clicked a few more times. "This is your audio channel."

"Not bad. And you're right. The other instruments disappear."

"Okay," I said, "Here's the master track from that tall mike up front." I was playing the segment of David's trumpet concerto. I knew that it had what I considered to be a great flute passage.

"Watch this," I said. "I can take YOUR track, and turn a Haydn trumpet concerto into a Jo's flute concerto with some guy playing a trumpet in the background." I added her channel to the master and turned on David's channel and subtracted it.

She giggled. "You'd kill 'im if he saw that. He's kind of full of himself." She looked over her shoulder to another girl standing, obviously impatient. "Oh, I gotta go. Ride's waiting. Thanks for showing me." And she left me with that smile embedded in my mind.

Eddie returned. He showed Bob some of the same things I had just showed Jo.

"I'm impressed," Bob said. "You're taking all the mixing capabilities of a sound studio and digitizing them. You don't bring the music to the studio, you bring the studio to the music."

"Yep," Eddie said. "So can we work together this semester?"

"How's that going to work?" Bob asked. "The two of you have real jobs. Normal hours. When our classes are."

"But don't you do special sessions like this?"

"About once a week, for our dedicated musicians."

"Can we work with them then?"

"Okay. But will you eat up time like tonight, setting up and doing level checks?"

"Nope," Eddie said. "Just like stuff on your computer. We have it as a configuration file, now. As long as we don't change geometry, you know, height and distance, we're good."

"Then let's go ahead and work together."

And that's how that phase of my life started. Once a week, Eddie and I would show up, set up, sit through practice, and tear back down.

On the second session, I smiled at Jo and she smiled back, and we found a reason to talk for a little bit.

Third session, more smiles. And at then, she came up to me. "Stoney, you drive to these things in your own car, right?"

"Yeah, why?" I asked.

"Carrie had to leave early. That's my ride. I need a lift."

"You live in this state, right?"

Chapter 3 »