Live Sound Engineers as Gatekeepers to Hearing Health? Interview with Michael Lawrence

Laura Sinnott 0:10
Hello and welcome to This Week in Hearing. We are your guest hosts Laura Sinnott, and Heather Malyuk. And today we’re very happy to introduce our guest, Michael Lawrence. Michael. He is kind of like an audio renaissance man is how I think of him. He is an audio engineer. I do I really do. He is an audio engineer, most specifically a systems engineer, which he’ll tell you a little bit about. He works for Rational Acoustics. Rational Acoustics is a company that makes acoustic tools and measurement software for professional audio. And he focuses on their smart SPL, their SPL feature set for the software called Smaart with two A’s. And he also is a podcast host for the Signal to Noise podcast. He’s an editor at Live Sound International publication, which I think I don’t know it, like hits all around the world, and tens of thousands of people read it. And he does research on sound level monitoring on live sound level monitoring. He has co authored articles for the Audio Engineering Society. He’s involved in the national hearing Conservation Association, and recently won the prized Safe in Sound award with Jamie Anderson and I think the Rational Acoustics team, is that correct? Michael? Okay, so not just you, but there’s a team. He’s also a mentor. And a week or two ago. Really good.

Michael Lawrence 1:46
You got one!

Laura Sinnott 1:47
Heather’s got on the way to

Heather Malyuk 1:49
Yep, minds on its way.

Laura Sinnott 1:51
I haven’t read it because I just got it yesterday, and I’ll need an autograph next time and see you. Oh, that

Michael Lawrence 1:55
is so sweet. Thank you. I do too much stuff. I was like totally zoning out and you’re reading. Like, it’s like it’s so boring.

Laura Sinnott 2:05
Because i was gonna say what I think is the most important accolade isn’t like a it’s not a title. But you are making and have in making efforts towards a culture shift of, of letting go of needing concert sound to be painfully loud. harmfully loud without sacrificing quality. So that’s something you know, it’s hard to just describe what your what that is. But it is it is important. And it’s going to have reverberations on really all to ultimately the world. And people won’t be hurting their their ears as much when they go to concerts. And so it’s kind of hard to explain, you know what all that you do. But that’s that was my attempt.

Michael Lawrence 2:49
I think you did a great job, but it’s probably better than I could have done it. I’m very impressed. Yeah.

Heather Malyuk 2:54
Thank you on top of all that he

tours, which I think, say it’s your day off, and you’re spending it your next hour here with us.

Michael Lawrence 3:02
Oh, I’ve been looking forward to this for weeks. So I’m really happy to be here. Yes.

Laura Sinnott 3:07
Um, so what is your day off? And can you tell us who you’re touring with where you are? What you’re doing?

Michael Lawrence 3:12
Sure. Yeah, right now I’m touring with a Swedish metal band called Ghost, which I’m actually- I ended up being a big fan of them, I did have done one tour with them previously. And the support acts are Mastadon and a band called Spirit Box. that’s new to me on this run. And it’s a US runner doing arenas. And we’ve got, I think, seven more shows coming up next week, or we’re going to be out in Chicago and kind of Green Bay Area. And then I fly home. And then I fly to California, I have a one off with the r&b singer, Miguel. And then after that, I’m going to sleep for like a month. So yeah.

Laura Sinnott 3:54
Um, and are you what are you doing there? Are you doing system engineering?

Michael Lawrence 3:57
Yeah, I’m a Systems Engineer for Ghost. Yeah. So basically, I don’t expect anyone who doesn’t do that for a living to know what it means. Basically, my job is to design and deploy the sound system every day in a way that achieves we try to achieve as much uniformity as possible. So this is an artist who cares about everybody getting a quality show, regardless of whether they’re in the front row or the back row or way up on the side. And we try to do it in a way that that allows everybody to have a similar sounding experience at a similar level. So that kind of plays into a lot of what I know you want to talk about today. But yeah, so that’s, that’s my job as a systems engineer is to basically wrangle the PA system every day,

Laura Sinnott 4:35
which is pretty impressive, because I used to think the front of house engineer had a, you know, an intense job of making the sound good for 10s of 1000s of people, but you actually need to make sure that that mix is reached to everybody. And that is it’s no small feat.

Michael Lawrence 4:50
We call it we have a phrase a waveform delivery service, right? So you’ve got a mix engineer who’s gonna stand there and make the best creative decisions they can based on what they’re hearing, but they Don’t know what’s happening, you know, if you’re in an arena, there’s 10,000 seats, they don’t know what’s happening and the other 9999 seats. And that’s my job is to make sure that what they’re doing, where they’re hearing it is translating to everywhere else in the venue.

Laura Sinnott 5:12
And you’re using, I mean, you’re relying on your own ears, and obviously, a lot of software and hardware that right.

Michael Lawrence 5:18
Yeah, obviously, your ears are, you know, are your prime shareholder. And obviously, one of the only things that you have available to you once the show starts, I can’t be moving measurement microphones around in the audience when there’s, you know, when it’s full of people, but yeah, we use, we use prediction software that every morning I’ll model the model the the venue, and software and put our sound system virtually in that model and see how it’s going to behave. And I can adjust the aim and adjust the level and adjust the tonality until I’m happy with it. And then I give that information to the Audio Crew, and we put the PA up and that way. And then once it’s up, I use more software, like you mentioned smart to take measurements of the response of the system and make sure that it’s consistent. And then, you know, we can adjust the different speakers and different levels and timings and do what we need to do to achieve as much consistency as we can. Cool. Yeah, it was a lot of tools,

Laura Sinnott 6:08
a lot of tools. And I just like pointing out that audiologists who are listening because it’s it is mainly an audiologist, audience. audiologist specialize in all different kinds of things from pediatrics to cochlear implants, even interoperative monitoring. And audio engineers are similar. I’m an audio engineer, but I honestly didn’t even really know what a systems engineer did, either. Until recently. So I just, yeah, it’s a great example of how refined you can get within your your area of expertise

Michael Lawrence 6:37
really has become more refined to I mean, the thing is audio audio lifetime is a very young field, very, very young field. You’ve been doing it for a couple decades. Seriously, right? By the way, there’s a there’s a wood chipper going on outside my house, I told them I was going to be recording this morning. So if they could please make as much noise as possible. So I don’t hear it. Okay, good. Because there, it’s getting wild. He told the background. So, yeah, I mean, there’s, there’s a whole job, somebody’s whole job is to coordinate different RF frequency radio frequencies for the ears, and the wireless mics and all that stuff. And you got to do that every every. So there’s all these jobs that just didn’t exist 10 or 15 years ago. And that’s, you know, I’m sure we’ll get to it. But that’s a lot of what we’re trying to do with our our podcast community and our mentorship programs is just get people exposed to these ideas. And we’ve had a lot of people say, Hey, I didn’t know what a systems engineer was, until I heard you talk about it. And then we’ve got a bunch of young people now saying, I think I want to do that. It’s cool. So that’s, you know, half the battle here is just saying, Hey, this is a thing that you can do. And it’s a job that somebody needs to do and something that you can get good at and make a living at. Alright, cool.

Heather Malyuk 7:38
Before we dive in, to some of the questions we had prepped to just, there are a lot of audiologists listening. And I think Laura and I take for granted that we work in the music industry. And we we understand kind of what the lifestyle is like, I wonder if you could just give us a quick overview of what a day is like for you. How many hours of sleep you get, how fatiguing it is and how I know a lot backstage can be hurry up and wait. Sometimes I don’t think that’s the case for a job like yours necessarily. But just give people an idea of how you live and how exhausting it really is to be on a tour.

Michael Lawrence 8:13
Sure, yeah. And you know, a lot of my work isn’t touring. But that’s what I’m doing right now. And so yeah, so it depends a little bit on the show. Right now, we’re in arenas. So typically 630 or 7am, we do what’s called Walking chalk. So the heads of department and the rigor will go in. And we basically you need to hang our whole show from the roof, all the speakers on the lights, all the video stuff has to hang off the steel, every building has a little bit different steel structure and the way that the the weight weight has to be distributed and where the beams are. And so we basically go in and chop the floor, here’s where we need our points to be. And then what do we need to do with the ceiling to get, you know, get these loads suspended there. So that’s how we start off with doing a bunch of doing a bunch of that at 630. At seven in the morning, I’m using my laser measurements to make a model of the venue around the same time. Trucks start dumping. We’ve got I think, seven trucks on this tour and some of these venues have four loading docks. Some of them you can only get one truck in at a time. So sometimes you’re just sitting there waiting for your truck to come up and get your stuff. Once you get the riggers are done with your points once your stuffs in the room then we can say start hanging the PA it takes about an hour to fly to fly in Arena size pa gets a very good PA Tech’s on this tour. They’re doing a great job. And I’m super bad at being a fly tech, but I try to try to help where I can without being too in the way. And so usually by 1130 or noon, we’ve got the PA up in the air. If I can I can start tuning in at that point. But sometimes there’s still set carts and stuff in the way on the arena floor so I can’t get my microphones where I need to get him. Sometimes I’m not able to run my snake cables off the front of house we can’t turn power on his front. So like you said a lot of waiting for other departments to do what they need to do and trying to stay out of their way and typically afternoon is line tricks, sound checks, making sure everything’s working properly. The lighting is good. In your programming, you know the videos doing their programming. Audio team is making sure everything’s functioning the way it’s supposed to. When you’re on a tour bands don’t often soundcheck everyday it depends on the act. But once you do five or six shows, we have this great thing called virtual soundcheck, where every night we record the show to a computer, we record every microphone input separately to a computer. And we’re able to play that back through the console the next morning. So we can actually do a soundcheck as if the band were on stage, adjust the levels, the different microphones and stuff like that. And a lot of my job is providing consistency. So if we’re doing that, right, the band shouldn’t feel like they need to come in and soundcheck every day. Because we’re, we’re making it you know, consistent for them. And then you know, 530 or six, you’ve got doors, our show starts at seven and goes till 11. And then we our audio departments out by about one lighting takes a lot longer, they have more stuff than we do. And they’re not as cool. I’m just joking. They’re out by like, usually 230 or so. So you’re gonna, you know, get back on the bus at at 230. And you’re gonna probably drive for hours overnight, and you start doing it again at 630.

Heather Malyuk 11:05
It’s a 20 hour day, and I was laughing because you said about not sound checking and all music audiologists know, the worst thing is, well, the band will see you at soundcheck and you show up they say they decided not to sound check today, everyone’s out golfing or whatever.

Michael Lawrence 11:17
Yeah, yeah. And that’s one of the other things is you try to you try to structure it so that you you prevent it providing these little pockets of hey, you don’t need to be here right now go take 20 minutes of you know, sleep on the bus or whatever like because you can’t operate on four hours and sleep safely, right for any period of time. And maybe once or twice that you can’t do it for six weeks. And so it becomes about learning Well, during from three to five. If I have no problems in my world, everything’s good. That’s what I’m going to go take a nap. And so people start peeling off and doing what they need to do. But no, it can take a week or two to settle into that. And build a routine. So yeah, it’s um, it’s a very demanding lifestyle in terms of your well being. It’s definitely not for everybody. I don’t even honestly think it’s for me. I don’t particularly love touring compared to the other stuff that I do. I do about 30,000 steps a day, in an arena. So you’re being really physically active, in addition to not getting a ton of sleep. So yeah, it’s definitely, it’s definitely a challenging lifestyle, in many ways.

Laura Sinnott 12:17
Well, so on on the topic of concert sound, I’ve heard you say before, Michael, that this idea that people should have earplugs should or need to bring earplugs to concerts. There’s something kind of wrong with that idea. I believe I’ve heard you say that. And I actually saw my nurse practitioner yesterday. And she had an Elton John T shirt on. And so we talked about it. She said, Oh, yeah, I saw Elton John yesterday, it was an amazing show. And I told her I was an audiologist. And she was she said, and I was so dumb. I can’t believe I forgot to wear earplugs. And obviously, it was so loud. And it just made me think about this idea that, yeah, people kind of know. And they expect concerts to be so loud that they should bring earplugs. Why? Why are concerts so loud?

Michael Lawrence 13:05
Yeah, you know, and that’s a question that people weren’t asking 10 or 15 years ago, I think we as an as a, as an industry, the live sound industry, we’ve done a really lousy job of creating a situation where the default expectation is that you’re going to be endangered or uncomfortable. People don’t show up with with hard hats, because they think the rigging might fall. Right. So it’s the end they don’t show up with you know, like all this electrical gear because they think that the pyro or the or the or the electrical, maybe it’s it’s just it’s a really interesting thing where we’re the one department where people seem to accept as a fact that it’s going to be unsafe or uncomfortable. And and that’s not great. You know, I’m not I’m not proud of that. There are some technical reasons, there are some historical reasons, I think, I think part of it, if you look at the history of what we’re doing, and again, Beatles at Shea Stadium, you know, that wasn’t even a real estate, they’re singing through the PA that they used to announce the batters, right, so that’s not even a real concert at that point. So everything we’re talking about has happened in in 40 years, or 50 years, it’s been very, very quick. And so you know, if you roll back the clock a bit, we’re stacking pa up on the stage on the corner of the stage. And if you need to go farther, you need to stack more of it. And if you need to go to the back and have it be a reasonable level in the back here to turn it up higher. So the people in the front are just getting absolutely steamrolled. In 2022, we fly RPAS they’re hung from the roof. And so you don’t have a speaker six inches from your face. And we have some incredible technology. You know, we have line array technology and we have delays and we have fields, we have all these things. And you can really achieve a system that doesn’t need to be 20 DB louder in the front of the room. I mean, our target for this tour is plus or minus three dB. So for mixed position down to the front, it goes up by three and then from its position to the back or the arena goes down by three and in most days we hit that right so so we no longer have a situation where it has to be brutal in the front row to get to the back. We now have modern technology. We will have to do that. That doesn’t mean it’s always possible to do that. There are of course time And when you have to ground stack, or you have to, you know, use less pa than you wanted to, and these things do happen. But the point is, technologically now it’s possible to eliminate that as a reason for doing it. The other major factor here is is how engineers think and how they approach a mix. You know, there are things that happen when you push a PA to its limits, that a lot of people like they like the sound of that little distortion that comes in when when the system is approaching its its linearity limits there, they like the sound of the malt is sort of like a multiband compression, it’s like a like, if you look at a mastering chain, right, so you have got your your exciters and your saturator is in your multiband compressions. And that’s very similar to what a PA is doing when it’s when it’s working too hard. The problem is, you know, again, roll back the clock, the PA would hit hit limit at right around concert level, because the technology wasn’t wasn’t where it is today. And so you would push your mix until you got into that sweet spot when it sounded different. And you go Yeah, that’s where I want to be. And that became part of the sound of the show, like like an over driven guitar amp is part of the sound of how a guitar sounds right. And if you don’t turn the guitar amp loud enough, it doesn’t it doesn’t sound right. And so the PA for a while was the same thing. But again, in 2022, we have very, very, very powerful, very capable systems that can achieve show level without being in limit, and have headroom and can reproduce those peaks cleanly. And so there’s a reason that they have as much power is because we, we don’t want to alter the waveform, it doesn’t it’s like you’re you know, just because you can’t drive faster than 70. Here in New York, it doesn’t mean that if your car only goes 70, that’s going to be a safe situation, you needed to have a little more power under the hood to behave the way that we need it to. And it’s kind of the same thing with a modern PA. But what that means is, you can no longer walk up to this thing and say I’m gonna push it until I hear it go nonlinear. And that’s where I’m going to sit because now that now that’s 108 DBA. It’s just you know, they’re insanely powerful systems nowadays. So a lot of what we’ve been trying to do at Rational Acoustics is kind of offer a new way of thinking that says, hey, we know you liked the sound of this, we’re not going to tell you how your show should sound. But don’t rely on the PA going on linear to create this stuff. Because that stuff happens at just crazy crazy levels. Now, do that in the console, there’s you can get that saturation in the console, you can get that multiband compression in the console, have your show sound the way you like it when it leaves the console. And then the PA will just reproduce that which is the PA jobs is just transmit that signal. You know, we don’t we don’t choose cables that, that have distortion. We don’t choose amplifiers that have distortion, you know, everything’s linear nowadays, it really is. And that’s, that’s where it’s been trending. So it’s kind of the same reason that people like vinyl or like tape, you know, there are certain distortions I’m sure both of you know better than I do that are pleasing to the ear and that affect our loudness perception in positive ways. And so these are real tools that are really helpful for MCs engineers, we’re just saying, We have to stop thinking of the PA is contributing that stuff. Because as the technologies matured and gotten better, the PA now contributes that stuff at levels that are just total insanity for us. And you’re gonna be driving audience out of the room before a modern arena system goes into limit probably.

Laura Sinnott 18:01
So it almost sounds like it like you said, it’s a mindset of the engineer that they’re perhaps not even aware that they can achieve that sound without like you said, having to steamroll people or having to, to produce such high output levels. And so from what I understand, you’re actually trying to teach engineers how to mix in this way, right, like to still achieve the sound that people want, but not at 108 DBA? And is this is this what what you’ve called in the past? Mindful mixing? Is that what that’s about?

Michael Lawrence 18:36
So we do a workshop on this Rational Acoustics and the real, the real name is pretty boring. It’s something like SPL applications for front of house engineers, but we’ve it’s become known as the how to beat the meter class. And that has a lot more more curb appeal, I guess. But but really what it is, is talking about what is loud, what is what is impact? Because SPL is not loudness, right, I actually have a shirt that says loudness isn’t level. And it’s and I wear that sometimes, right? Because Because the thing is, you know, just using using raw SPL as a way to achieve impact. It’s a it’s a blunt force tool, and it doesn’t work past a point, you know, and people get tired and you have to go more and then it keeps chasing itself. So So let’s understand what what makes things sound loud. When we say this loud. What do we mean, you know, because you might be totally comfortable at the concert that’s 100 DBA. And you might go to church on a Sunday morning and it might be at three TVA, there was a church was too loud today. So So we’re not talking about what the SPL was when you said that what does that mean? What when you say is louder, it’s too loud. It’s not loud enough? What’s going on there? You know, from a perceptual standpoint, that makes us feel that way. Let’s understand that. Let’s understand what what creates impact other than crazy amounts of SPL and SPL is an ingredient in that and that formula, but there are a lot of other ones that that haven’t really been talked about because SPL Hold for a lot of times, it’s just treated as a majority shareholder there.

Laura Sinnott 20:03
Yeah, I think that’s something audiologists it is one of the, I guess similarities in our fields, we do learn a lot about the differences between loudness and then sound level. And that I think that we could appreciate the just the importance of understanding that difference. When you’re so kind of moving on to, to smart because I find this potentially could be a really good tool for audiologists, those audiologist who are involved in hearing conservation, and that there are not so many of them. But hopefully there will be more is is just different ways of practicing audiology grows. But I’ll just mention that I’m thinking of using smart myself with an orchestra that I’m working with, in order to to monitor their sound levels, because in orchestra, it is incredibly dynamic. You can use personal dosimeters. But I haven’t actually used the software yet. I’ve learned some about it from you, Michael. And can you just give us a little bit of background for for audiologists to learn about what the tool specifically you work on with within smart?

Michael Lawrence 21:11
Sure. Yeah, you know, and you kind of mentioned smartscan have like a multi tool for audio measurement, right. So we can measure room acoustics, we can measure reverb, we can measure the response of a PA system, we can measure all sorts of stuff. Part of the toolset that’s built into smart is is a sound level measurement tool set. And that’s something that really has grown. We’re about to release version nine, the end of this month and our version eight came out in the first eight Dotto came out in 2016. And we’ve just kind of been adding bits to it since then. And that couple of years, we’ve seen the demand for sound level measurement tools just explode. So if you look at what eight Dotto did versus what eight at the top five does now, we’ve added so much stuff and a lot of that is people calling us up and saying, Hey, you should it should do this. A lot of that is me going to concerts and talking to engineers and saying look at this thing. What do you think? What should it do? What questions do you have, and we really try to build a tool that it’s useful for these people. So this is something that’s becoming part of the industry consciousness in a way that it wasn’t in the past. And so we are basically trying to create a Swiss Army knife of sound level monitoring so we can do the stuff that everybody’s used to the fast and the slow and the A in the sea, which for a long time was kind of all you had if you had a little you know what I call the Party favorite meters. You got your little Radio Shack, handheld thing you know, with the nine volt battery in it and you had to choose do I want fast or slow? Do I want aarC? There you go. Problem is for the types of questions that we’re typically trying to answer. And then the live event world. What was the level the last set was a level of the song was, you know, those are useless. They’re completely if one second of context on SPL SLO is a one second integration time, right? So you can’t watch three seconds of a movie and tell me what the plot is we need more context. So So we’ve we’ve our industry uses predominantly a metric called Le Q, which I would assume a lot of your listeners are familiar with. But it’s basically just an average over a longer period of time. And so like how much how much, you know, how much energy do we see over this over this window of time. And then you can start to say, well, what’s the level of this performance over 10 or 15 minutes. So getting people comfortable the idea of an LE Q and we can do as many le Q’s as we want in smart eight, you’re not you know, a lot of the tools that people were using for a long time, they would do one or two. And it was like a one minute 10 minute. And there you go. And so smart, you can do as many cues as you want, and anything from one second to 24 hours. And you can do a weighted and C weighted, and you can do unweighted and you can do octave banded, right? So we’re just, we kind of have this idea of like the, you know, the Infinite Monkeys that are typing, like we just say, here’s a bunch of stuff that it can do. And people go out. And they then use this in ways that we’re like, Oh, we didn’t think anyone would do that in that way. So we’ve really created a tool set that just allows people to build what they need out of it. So bunch of FAQs is important. And I think that the most important thing for this conversation is something we had an eight dot for, which is dosimeter measurements. So we can do NIOSH and OSHA dosimeters in real time. And I think that, you know, not that no one was doing up before as you said, you can buy these things that go on but the reason that’s so significant in our world is because smart has already been at mix position in live events for you know, smarter now for 25 years. And and so if you go to if you go to 50 concerts, 49 of them probably you’re gonna see smart. So what we what we were able to do is not go out and you know, you can’t go on Shark Tank, say everyone should buy this new dissimilar thing that I made good luck. We’re already there. People are already using this tool. So by saying, Hey, we added this stuff that doesn’t cost any more just update your software. It’s a free update. Now you can do all this stuff. We are able to get this tool into the hands of people without having to get people to try to adopt a new platform and start from scratch. And so now all of a sudden, everybody who’s out in the industry can do sound level measurement. Everybody who’s out there using this tool can do disseminator and one of the things we’ve made If I was we made the NIOSH and OSHA, they’re enabled by default, you don’t even have to turn them on. So if you pull up a sound level meter in smart, you are generating exposure data. And so kind of what I wanted is for it to be a little tugboat on the industry to just, you know, we’re not we’re not the noise police and I go around cracking people on the on the shins with a ruler and saying, turn it down. But we are saying, hey, let’s be aware of this. The first step for me is just let’s look at the data. What are the numbers? You know, I spent a year just taking this thing to shows and logging shows and just so we get some idea of what typically type of exposure doses are people being exposed to when they go to a live event? We didn’t know, we even though you know, typically, what’s the highest, you know, peak? So

Laura Sinnott 25:38
we don’t have that – what are we finding in terms of that?

Michael Lawrence 25:42
exactly right, so So now I’ve got, you know, every show that I’ve been to, and every show that I’ve worked on for the last three years, I’ve got some level data. And so now we know what what type of Peak C max values that we see, we know what type of exposure that we see. And that has been a big starting point in terms of how do we approach educating about this, because we didn’t know those things. You know,

Heather Malyuk 26:00
what is that – Sorry, Laura, let’s say when are we going to add to your data collection? Pre and Post hearing tests at concerts? When are we going to create a new safety scale for the music industry? Because we’re ready. Are you ready?

Michael Lawrence 26:15
You know what? That’s a great question. I think it’s a complicated question. Our industry, in some ways, moves very quickly. And in some ways it’s crawling. I am really convinced that step one is to have data. Step one is what we’re doing now, which is saying, Hey, you can measure this, you don’t have to guess about how dangerous this is. Because you can find out for yourself. Right? So and awareness, which is another part of what we’re doing with our classes. And like you said, I’ve co authored some papers for AES, where we’re just trying to get information out there. There is no shortage of information on sound exposure, as you both know, but most of it is not packaged in a way that’s useful or actionable to a live sound engineer who’s didn’t go to audiology school and doesn’t read medical papers, you know, how do we get these people on board with this stuff and give them a functional knowledge of it. So they can make decisions. So we can we can gather the data, but the data doesn’t mean anything unless the people gathering the data understand what the data means. And that’s really where we are still, there are some conversations happening with AES and World Health Organization where we’re looking at what would it take to do an industry wide certification? They just, you know, actually, I think it was, it was in March, Heather, that’s when we met the World Health Organization standard for safe listening venues came out. And they cited some of the research that I worked on, which is pretty cool. But what’s the next step? How do we now put some guardrails on this? And there’s a ton of conversation there about should there be rules? Should there be laws? Should there be regulations, I really feel that the most successful way to do this is to go with professional responsibility. Like regardless of most of the shows that I work on in my career, there’s no law that says you can’t expose people to this level I live in and I work in the US, right? If you go to Europe, that’s not the case. But where I live, most of the time, there’s nobody saying, ‘Hey, turn that down, you’re hurting people,’ right? But I’m still involved with operating system that has the ability to hurt people just as you do with a car or when you’re doing rigging, or Pyro or electrical or any of the other stuff that we do in a professional environment. It’s in our best interest not to hurt somebody. And it’s a little harder with audio because it doesn’t you don’t see it in the same way as like a pyro failure, or a trust. You know, you think about the horrific stuff like the Indiana State Fair collapse, right? Like there’s just acute consequences of somebody who’s being negligent. And you don’t necessarily see that and audio might be years before somebody realizes that they’ve been doing damage. But the responsibility is still there. And so I although I think it’s a very productive conversation, to start seeing things about certification, and legislation and stuff, I do believe that’s coming. I think the most fruitful way is to go straight to the engineers who got their fingers on the faders of our controlling what people are being exposed to, and just help these people understand not only the information, but also their responsibility. And that’s, you know, like I said, we’re talking about, it’s a big, it’s a big, heavy thing. And it’s got a lot of momentum, and we’re not going to change anything overnight. But what we can do is help people understand what they’re dealing with. And I actually feel pretty positive that we’ve been able to affect some good change that way.

Laura Sinnott 29:19
Well, that’s one reason we wanted you on this podcast. Because you’re I mean, there are not a lot of people in audio engineering, who who kind of care about this topic, and audiologists in theory we care about it so much that this is what we’re our profession is based off of is helping people preserve their hearing or treat hearing disorders when they have them. So we just wanted to also let audiologists know like there are people across the river, who like yourself, Michael, who are really passionately working on trying to make change. And I think also your perspective on almost putting the responsibility in the professionals hands is an interesting one. We’ve heard of Oh, the responsibilities would be the audience member wearing earplugs. Other people think it should be government regulation. But I think practically we all know how incredibly challenging that is. But it is an interesting idea, to put it some of the responsibility, at least in the hands of the professional. So I think if there’s any way audiologists can help, we shouldn’t be there in any way, shape or form.

Michael Lawrence 30:23
I mean, the it goes kind of back to this idea of informed consent, right? You know, because a lot of people go, Oh, the people chose to go to a concert, like, yes, but you know, if they thought there was a actual real, non negligible possibility that the rigging would fall and kill them, they probably wouldn’t make that same decision to go down there and stand under that stuff. So there’s a real trust here that the people who do this are, are doing it correctly. You know, we’ve had a couple shows ago, conversation with a rigger, he said, I can’t hang that, we have to figure out a different way to do it. Because it’s, I’m not going to allow it to be hung this way, because that’s not safe. And if he doesn’t say that, no one else says it, he’s the only check on that. So we have to be very serious about that, you know, if we don’t care, no one else is gonna care. So so there’s a real professional obligation there. But I think, you know, a lot of it is I mean, stuff like the the Apple Watch is a big deal now, right? Because we’re no longer the sole shareholder of this, you’ve got an arena show how many Apple watches out there in an arena now? You know, you got 10,000 people in there, there’s probably 3000 Apple watches in there. And they’re gonna go, Hey, this isn’t safe. Now, I’m not I’m not really interested in the conversation about how accurate this this thing is. Is it a class compliant measurement device? No. Should we use it to make enforcement decisions? No, but there’s a consciousness there, that is saying, hey, this isn’t a good thing to do to yourself. And so sort of the cats out of the bag, in a way, in a good way. And so now, there’s a little more visibility of the issue, and people are starting to ask, I’ve seen way more internet forum posts and Reddit posts. Why Why? Why am I you know, why am I being exposed to this stuff, too, you know, and so that and that’s compound that with the issue of you can’t look at a meter and go that’s, that’s, you know, management loves to come up and turn up, you’re looking at a number like, are you listening? High the meter- Does it sound does it sound like it has impact? Does it sound good, you know, and so we have to now bridge that gap as well, which is, let’s just let’s, let’s not get caught up with with, you know, making sure the number on the meters high enough for your, whatever silly mental system you’ve created. Let’s talk about how it sounds, you know, and I can, I’m not, I’m not really a mix engineer. But I can still given you know, given a certain limit, I can mix a show that has more impact and sounds louder than most other engineers, just because I’ve studied all of these things that play into that, or, or consequently, my shows tend to measure much lower than that another mix engineer shows and again, yeah, and it’s not a hotshot mix engineer thing. You know, we did a festival, we did r&b festival in Atlanta. And you know, it’s an r&b festival. So it’s like 102-103, from a house for eight hours, which is like too much. It’s like too much. And we’re the headliner. And I’m not going to come out and do that thing, where I feel like we have to one up everybody else. And I had to be one louder, right. I ran our show at 97. You know, and the review that I saw said that our set had the most energy

Laura Sinnott 33:21
and audiologists for context 97 is a lower level than most concerts. Yeah. Because audiologists might, we might not even know that right? We might just assume that. But 97 is not high for live concert.

Michael Lawrence 33:37
It’s lower than average. It’s not, you know, it’s not middle of Barnes and Noble, but But it’s, it’s lower than average. And the wonderful thing about the way that the exposure math works is even two or three dB lower is a significant improvement in terms of, of doing less damage to people, right. So if you can shave off two dB, shave off two DB off, you’re off your mix and learn how to make that impactful. And the other thing is boy, people loosen up and they’re more comfortable and they’re talking to each other and they seem to just enjoy it, but it when they’re not being pummeled. So I reject this whole that’s what the people want saying because they don’t they showed up with earplugs in their pocket only worried about this, you know, so just let people relax a little bit. There’s, there’s a theater in my hometown that I mix that and sometimes in the box office guy said when you’re here mixing it’s the only time we don’t get complaints is too loud so that people don’t want to be steamrolled.

Heather Malyuk 34:28
I think 97 is great. And for the very young audiologists listening Barnes and Noble was a book and music store was very quiet. In case they’ve never been to a bookstore. That’s where I’m

Laura Sinnott 34:40
not the- online Barnes and Nobles online. It still exists and

Heather Malyuk 34:45
still opened? not around where I

Michael Lawrence 34:48
live. There’s one like, five minutes from where Laura is. Yeah.

Heather Malyuk 34:53
Oh,

Laura Sinnott 34:54
yeah. It wasn’t gonna go and reminisce. It’s hilarious. And I try to not use Amazon And I don’t have to so. So let’s kind of question about numbers and Smaart. Because clinical audiologist, they’re pressed for time they get to see a patient, they have 20 minutes, 25 minutes. And for those who they might be working with an audio engineer and musician, but a lot of audiologists will probably see concert goers, and an audiologist were- they’re gonna want to know, we, like, we were gonna want to know, well, what is that number? What do we tell a patient? Okay, when it hits this number, it’s unsafe. Now we all kind of know the answer. The answer is there is no one number. But this is not an answer, Michael, that I am asking you to give, give us a number. But it’s almost like a discussion with the three of us. It we’re gonna need some kind of quicker answer for a clinical audiologist in order to give their patients some information they can actually use. And I feel like, you know, NIOSH is interesting. OSHA is interesting. But could there be something better? You know, and if we have the tools with Smaart, could we figure something out?

Michael Lawrence 36:00
Yeah. I don’t want to say lose sleep over this. But definitely something I spent a lot of time thinking about, right? Because when you say to somebody, oh, I do channel measurement for a living, they’re like, Well, how else? Do they want a number? Right? They do – You know, and you can’t because I would like to say it’s about how long for how long? You know, so So going into account, if you look at the World Health Organization guidance, right, that that’s for someone who’s going to four shows a year, it’s not for someone who mixes five shows a week, right? So so you have to consider that but, but if you want a number and a starting point, again, I would go back to that standard 100 dBA, weighted over the typical length of a concert. So we’re gonna call it four hours, that’s kind of a line in the sand where if you’re above that, you probably don’t want to be exposed to that. And as I hate to even do that

Heather Malyuk 36:46
you’re calling 100dBA The line in the sand?

Michael Lawrence 36:48
They are saying that should that should be the the limit that should not be exceeded. Now, a lot of shows are under that. But a lot of shows are not. And so I think it’s I think it’s a reasonable starting point where if you go higher than that you’re not doing that much in terms of protection. And if you go lower than that, you’re not being super realistic about the current state of things. I remember being probably 17 or 18 years old, and I went to a local audiologist. And I told her what I did. And I said, Look, you know, my shows aren’t loud, I go I mix it like 93. And she goes, Oh, that’s still way too loud. That’s not a realistic answer. No one’s gonna you know what I mean? Like even even a Norah Jones concert, it’s like you can’t so so this is part of the issue is there’s a disconnect between what y’all were taught? And your I mean, here’s the thing, I have the handbook of clinical audiology here, the cats one, sometimes I have trouble sleeping, right. So I read that there’s 1000 pages in that book, and 20 of them are about sound exposure. That’s 2%. Right. So so the stuff that is being taught in audiological circles versus the stuff that the pro audio industry is involved with. It’s just such a huge gap there still – ‘preach’ – Right? And and that was part of our problem. When we when we I remember we had a meeting with with Jamie our President at Rational Acoustics. Hey, hey, we’re going to introduce more sound measurement tools, we’re gonna introduce exposure. And we were like, Well, why do you use A-weighted concert levels? Because isn’t that for, you know, we had all these questions that we didn’t know, and where do you go to get that stuff. And so I was like, I’ll take the bullet, I’ll read this book, you know, so, so I read all this ideological stuff. And I realized how little of it is useful for people doing live music and how little research is done on live music, so much of it is industrial, or commercial or speech. Right marching bands, you know, this, this thing where you can be in the front row at a concert and be exposed to, you know, 140 dB peak C. For hours at an EDM festival. There’s no data on that. Because that’s a new thing. You know, that wasn’t happening 30 years ago that just didn’t exist. So when you talk about well, we have noise from, you know, steady state noise measurements on factory floors. That doesn’t really help us with this person who’s at a concert and is just getting, you know, their pant legs are flapping, because there’s so much bass. I’m not saying that’s inherently bad people like that. It’s part of why people go to a concert. It’s part of the experience we want to deliver when we do a live event. But we also don’t want to hurt anybody. So we need to understand how to do that and minimize the risk. And and that’s been a big challenge that a lot of my colleagues at AES are working on is we don’t even have a lot of data on this. And you can’t exactly put people in front of subs and say we’re going to turn up until it’s dangerous and see what happens. Like you can’t ethically you can’t research it that way.

Laura Sinnott 39:28
Which could be a really we I listened to another podcast recently with Barbara Weinstein, who’s an she contribute has contributed a lot to the audiology world and has done a lot of research and she talks about how she tries to publish in non audiology journals. And it’s just such a good idea and that’s again, another reason like hope, hopefully we can somehow collaborate whether it’s other myself or other audiologists who are interested with you and your team and you Perhaps even get some data published in audiology journals, not just Audio Engineering Society. I think that could just like you said, raising awareness is really important. And we need to just kind of continue to get that data out there.

Michael Lawrence 40:12
Yeah. And that’s a big problem, too. I mean, even even there’s AES papers on this stuff. Most of the touring engineers that are out there don’t read AES. And that’s something we talked about in our as meetings is okay, great. You got this data. Now what? And so we do stuff like put articles in Live Sound international and Pro Sound web and, and the publications that the some of the some of the the touring people do read? How do you get this information to houses of worship? I swear to you, I did it. I was involved in a consultation at a church. And they said, Your subwoofers are so loud that at Christmas, some people in the front rows threw up, right, and so you’re hurting people, but how the people that are in charge of those decisions at this church are not going on AES and looking for papers, right? So how do we get that information to them? It has to be bite size it has to these things. I mean, they’re going on YouTube, they’re going on, you know, pro sound web and looking at it the articles in like, you know, Trisha magazine, and so, so you have to figure out what to distill this. I call it like cooking spinach, right? We all knew all of this stuff about this topic, because we all study this for a living, but I can’t, there’s got to be an elevator pitch, there’s got to be a 30 second answer. Because I can’t go to the pastor of a church and say, here’s seven papers that I wrote, that’s not helpful. That’s not useful. He’s not gonna be impressed. Nobody cares. Right? So how do you give him a bite size, bit of information that’s going to be productive. And that’s a big challenge with this, because some of these topics are very, very hard to minimize, right? Yeah.

Heather Malyuk 41:37
It’s the same in audiology. You know, that pastor, that worship leader might go to a local audiologist. And the audiologist does not know what to say, you know, we see this a lot on our audiology messaging boards, we get so little information on hearing conservation, in our training, you mentioned it in the Katz book. And then we have people coming to see audiologists, and if they’re not seeing one of a handful of us who deal with this day in and day out and have studied it, it off, they often don’t get the right help. And so that’s, again, this interdisciplinary approach is so important to getting this information out there. Because audiologists could help lead the way if they knew how to

Michael Lawrence 42:17
you know, and that’s kind of what I said about I still think we’re in the information. And in kind of, I’m going to call it I hate this term, the evangelism stage. Right? And yes, we do need to look at better models for sound exposure that are there are music specific and occupation specific, we do need to look at that is very important. But you know, still, I know is an example of something like smart, which is, which is a clear industry standard for this. We still I still see posts all the time. And some says, Look, I’m looking for a way at my church to measure level and I go, Hey, there’s this thing that I work on. And then I think it’s like, like, oh, wow, where has this been on my life, I’m like, well its been, it’s been a thing you just know about it. So we still even where you’re saying, Well, we have we have whatever market share, or it’s, you know, we have become a standard tool, you still have all these people who have never heard of it and don’t know that it exists. And it’s the same thing about the information. A lot of people were learning or just hungry for information about this. There was some cultural stuff where they hold if it’s too loud, you’re too old, blah, blah, blah. But by and large, people do care about this, and they want to know about it, and they just don’t know where to go. So I think before we get to better models, and all that stuff, and a lot of that’s coming, but I think the first step is still, hey, this is a thing you should know about it, we have tools to help you understand it, here’s some context help you understand that we are still in the stage of just getting people to understand what we’re talking about. That’s where the rest of this is going to come from.

Laura Sinnott 43:41
And probably at the end of the day, at least right now. Like if you see a patient today who asks you Oh, I’m going to a concert. And you know, should I bring earplugs? The answer just has to be yes. At this point.

Michael Lawrence 43:53
It just has. And that’s it. Yeah. And sometimes people misinterpret I’m not I’m not shaming people who bring earplugs to concerts, right? You should you should protect yourself and and, you know, if you know you’re going to a metal show, it’s probably responsible to put earplugs in your pocket before you go. I actually you know, I keep a big bag of foamies at front of house and I, I look through sometimes you’ll see a little kid just you know, and I’ll bring him a pair. But you know, I’ll do some if a if a parent comes up and says, Hey, do you have earplugs? I’ll be like, yeah, man, but come on, like, you know, you knew you’re gonna metal concert, you know. So. So yeah, take some personal responsibility, but I’m looking forward to a place in the future of the industry where we don’t feel like we need to protect ourselves from that because the professionals that are responsible for it are going to be doing it.

Laura Sinnott 44:33
Right. Yeah. Can we keep going you guys?

Michael Lawrence 44:37
Hell, yeah.

Laura Sinnott 44:38
Okay. Hi there. Do you want to talk? Talk a little about about national hearing conservation.

Heather Malyuk 44:43
I would love to. That’s how Michael came into my life. So great ever since so. NHCA, I think is NHCA, in my mind is like the hidden jewel of Audiology. And even though it’s not fully an audiology Association, super interdisciplinary, we have all kinds minds of members all kinds of presentations, but it’s centered around hearing conservation. Right now. I’m on the leadership advisory team for the NHCA I used to be on the Executive Council. Oh, and Heather,

Laura Sinnott 45:10
you won an award this year, too, from the National, from the NHCA didn’t you?

Heather Malyuk 45:17
the lecture. Yeah. Based on music industry, it’s always music industry stuff with me. Um, so I met Michael there because he won the safe and sound award. Well, he he and his colleagues at Rational Acoustics. And, Michael, I’m what, you know, what did that mean to you guys, I and let me preface it by saying I think a lot of audiologists, if they’re listening, they think of NHCA, as being maybe antiquated and military focused or OSHA focused. And that’s kind of not what we are at all. That’s a sector of it. But it’s so much more innovative and creative than that. And one of the ways we show that is through the safe and sound award. And if you wouldn’t mind just telling our listeners what what that meant for you guys, in terms of

Michael Lawrence 46:03
it was really funny, because like, we’re not that stuff’s not on our radar, we’re not following ideological stuff, or the conferences, you know, I, I’ve spent a reasonable amount of time reading papers. But that’s, that’s about it. We live in Live Events world, that’s where my head is all the time. You know, I’m at shows, and I’m talking to engineers and dealing with PA systems. So we’re working on these tools. And, and that’s kind of, you know, we’re in our own little and then we get this email about and we’re like, what, what are you talking about it is we just didn’t, we had no context for what this thing is, or that anyone was paying attention to that anyone outside of our own tiny little, you know, we’re our tiny little industry. And we’re a tiny little corner of that tiny little industry. It’s a niche within a niche, you know? So, like, we like what, what, what is what are you talking about? What is all this and I’ve been so the thing that was kind of funny is that we started studying sound exposure, because we’re gonna build these tools, and all these questions like about NIOSH, and so because I’m, you know, I’ll call NIOSH, because a lot of people like wouldn’t even think that, but I go like a phone number on the website. I’m gonna call him right. And they didn’t know they weren’t expecting to hear from me. They didn’t know what what was. So I got passed around a bunch. But I got I got answers I talked to I want to say David Byrne was the guy’s name, if I remember correctly, he was an audiologist over NIOSH. And and so now I’ve got a lovely little email chain with the NIOSH people whenever we have a question about this, and this is a big thing for us cause we’re not an audiologist, we’re not doctors, we’re sound engineers, we develop software. So if we’re going to stand up in front of rooms of people and talk about this, I have a very big ethical obligation to make sure that the stuff we’re saying is based in science, and you know, wouldn’t be contradict. So I remember getting this email that a bunch of the nice people had sat through one of my trainings that I was doing on this, I think for NAMM, or something like that, or event safety Alliance or something. And that’s a freaking nightmare for somebody who learned what they learned from the internet. You know what it means to have a bunch of degreed audiologists come and sit through your class on structure, I was so nervous, I was like, oh, no, I’m about to get some nasty emails. And they’re like, We think this is great. I was like, really think is great. And so we were just so overwhelmed by kind of, you know, we kind of take what we do for granted, you know, that’s just just what we do. And so the fact that somebody in the auto logical community was was paying attention to it and thought it was cool that it was helpful. Were was very humbling. And we’re very, very honored. So that’s been that’s been pretty cool. And it’s also been really nice for us. Because, again, who are we right? We’re not, you know, to, to stand up to our industry and say, Hey, you should listen to what we’re saying about this, not because we want to sell you software, but because this is important. I don’t care if you use our tools or somebody else’s tools, you know, we want to make a tool that that is helpful and useful. And we think that when you look at what you can use that you’re gonna go, oh, yeah, this tool is cool. And it makes sense for me, we hope that’s what you do. But the end of the day, my bigger concern is that you understand these topics, and we’re all moving the industry towards a place where we’re not doing damage to people. And so it became very cool for us to have sort of a more official backing of people that did go to school for this and are trusted authorities, from a medical perspective to say yes, you guys are going in the right direction with this and you’re, you’re you’re doing stuff that’s positive, and that was like a really cool feeling. And so we got the little, you know, a little plaque in the mail and, and I see I was like you I’m gonna send it to your house because I work mostly remotely and I was like, I don’t care about the plaque like none of this for the plaque. You know, like that little pat on the shoulder that was like, Hey, you this is your you’re going in the right direction was kind of the really cool thing for me. Yeah,

Heather Malyuk 49:44
it was really special for those of us there who work in the music industry to see you guys there. And you know, I had heard of Rational Acoustics, but I really didn’t know too much about it. And I think it was a proud moment for all of us, especially because you say you were a niche within a niche and I I want to ask you for the AES papers. So you have co authored three papers in the past year, sort of developing the foundations. Is it more than three?

Michael Lawrence 50:09
Like seven? It’s like six by this point

Laura Sinnott 50:13
Oh, okay, that amazes

Heather Malyuk 50:15
me. I hate writing. So kudos to you. But how, you know, how did the group come together? And what is the experience like working, working with other authors coming to a consensus creating future goals? I mean, who who are who are these people? How did you find each other? Was it just through AES? Or are you pulling others in? Or how is that process going?

Michael Lawrence 50:37
Yeah, so audio engineering, society has a lot of sections. And so there’s the acoustics and sound reinforcement is kind of the part that I’m, that I’m involved with. And so within that, there’s a working group. And our working group, there’s, there’s a couple of us, Dr. Adam Hill is the chair and he kind of oversees it. But there’s, there’s, there’s about five or six of us from various parts of the world that are involved with sound level measurement in particular. And that’s part of this is that there just aren’t that many people in the audio industry talking about this. So if you start talking about it, and you start sharing data, you’re gonna get an email that says, hey, come talk about this with us. Because because it’s not it. There’s only it’s not like, you know, people that like to do model trains, like, there’s only like six of us, right? So so there was the a bunch of my colleagues did a survey a couple of years ago, just to kind of get an industry read on. Hey, what do people think about sound exposure? Do you think there should be regulations? Do you know what le Q means? You know, what NIOSH is? What tools are you exposed to seeing in the field. And so I sent an email, I was like, I am really interested in this topic. And I would like to get involved in as kind of you show up and you jump in. So we we’ve done, I want to say five or six papers over the last 18 months or so, about various aspects of this, we did a big one was like 200 pages about it’s called understanding and managing sound exposure and noise pollution and outdoor events. And that, as far as I’m concerned, is one of the most definitive things that’s been released on this topic for our industry. Because it’s not piecemeal, we kind of like there’s like 300, sources cited, right? So it’s kind of all like dumped into one stew of stuff. And then we’ve done a bunch of shorter ones that are particularly about monitoring and regulations and practices. How do we get better? And now we’re doing one about certification and stuff like that? So yeah, there’s there’s five or six of us, the AES that are just talking about everything that has to do with sound level monitoring. One things we’re talking about now is, how do we measure the directivity of a whole PA system? You know, how much louder? Is it in the front in the back and on the sides? And that plays into our conversations about noise pollution and stuff like that? No one’s tried to do that before. Yeah, you know, so just just new questions that we have this chi, it would be really helpful if we could like measure the dynamic range of a live event, that way we can measure it in a recording, well, that’s really complicated lives to give audience noise, you have gaps between songs. And so even something as simple as dynamic range, we had to do a paper on that, and say, Here’s how, here’s a method we came up with to measure dynamic range, because now you’re going to feed this into algorithms, you know what I mean? So just just, just giving yourself a foundation to make useful datasets, requires a lot of thought, and I’ll be honest, I can’t follow a lot of the math, you know, Adam Hill is a genius. And a lot of the other guys on this group are absolute geniuses. My role in a lot of this is, is to act as almost an editor and just help make sure that people who aren’t geniuses with math can follow it. And are we communicating? Clearly, and we define this term before we use it. And you know, I will make no bones about the fact that I don’t follow. I understand conceptually, everything we’re talking about, but I can’t spit out these these models in these in these math formulas like these guys can. But a lot of my role is to say, hey, humans who don’t have math degrees, you’re gonna read this, are we communicating this clearly, you know, and I think we should put this paragraph here. And I think we should use this term instead of this term, because it’s going to be less confusing for people. And so in a way, I’m a student, even though my name is on the paper, I’m still a student of it. And I’m still trying to trying to learn and follow along with everybody else. And so I’ve kind of got a unique perspective there. And it’s a little bit like the Slumdog Millionaire thing. You know, my whole career has been has been like that, like, Well, yeah, I didn’t. I didn’t know the answer to that question. You just asked until I co authored a paper on it. And that’s the only reason I can answer this question for you. But, but I didn’t know it until I read the paper draft, right. So I’m constantly just following along and, and I might poke my fingers in here and there, but it’s really, we’re all we’re all learning about this. I was

Heather Malyuk 54:45
gonna say all the best professionals I know are lifelong students have each other. You know, I know Laura, because I knew her when she was in school and I’m learning from her now is my colleague and, you know, that’s really how the professional world works best. If we’re all in this kind of learning process together, I, we’re talking a lot about sound levels in venues, which is great. One area that audiologists often work in is in your monitoring. And there is a misconception in audiology, for most audiologists that they are protective devices just inherently because that’s how they’ve been sold to audiologists and musicians. And there are tools like the Audix, TM2 ear simulator, and MiEM, and of course, they’ve come out recently, there’s also the dB check Pro, which has been revamped to really drive voltage off of in years from any major manufacturer, so we can look at sound levels, and we can least get a get an idea of SPL, you know, as best we can. What are some levels you’ve seen? Have you done much work in this area?

Michael Lawrence 55:47
You know, it’s interesting, I haven’t I’m not a monitor engineer, I don’t do a lot of work with in ear monitors in particular, but you know, we obviously, when you’re going to use the TM2, or you’re going to use the SLS Audio MiEMi, and you’re going to measure the in-ears. Most people are using Smaart for that. And so, so we are involved in helping them use that tool. And we brought we brought MiEMi up to Dr. Laura’s office, and we showed her how it worked. And and so, you know, I don’t measure a lot, but I talked to monitor engineers about it all the time. And yeah, I mean, some of these levels are just insanity. You know, like just 106 107 112 A weighted just people are just, you know, you’re, as you know, often dealing with a musician who’s been doing this for so long, they’ve already got hearing loss. And it wasn’t, it wasn’t that the IEM caused it, but it’s certainly not helping. So that is, that is something that, you know, I think, again, the tools didn’t really exist for that a decade ago. So you see stuff like the TM2 in the in the MiEMi popping up. And now it’s something that you can throw in your backpack if you’re a monitor engineer, and you could actually get data on this in the field. Because previously, IEM measurements where you had to use, you know, the the GRAS stuff, or the other position stuff is happening in the lab or is happening at the manufacturer with very expensive stuff that was really difficult to do in the field accurately. So a lot of people like, well, the MiEMi’s like, you know, nine 900 bucks or whatever, and they think it’s a lot of money. But I’m gonna give it the context of this as it was previously a $50,000 rig, that is now a $1,000 rig, right. And in a laptop. So much like with system measurement and smart in general, it’s come to a point where it is actually practical to do in the field by a person who’s not in the laboratory. And so that’s definitely moving in the right direction. I think it’s back to the same thing. We’re back to the data gathering still. Yeah, and we’re back to basic stuff like, Hey, I’ve got a pair of in ear monitors, and left and right don’t match. And I can prove that they don’t match because I can measure it. The we couldn’t always do that.

Laura Sinnott 57:41
Somehow we can sneak in Oh, and by the way, I also noticed your monitoring at a 106 DBA. Like me to explain why this is?

Michael Lawrence 57:51
Yeah. Well, I think, you know, recently we had a thing where the artist was like I can’t I can’t hear and the monitor, check, measure them and found out that left and right were out of polarity. So that’s why they were using that immersive kind of 3d imaging technology to claim things playing. Yeah. Right. So when you do a polarity reversal, and Clang, you’re messing with it, of course, you’re gonna feel like you can’t really focus on what’s happening, because you’re affecting all the the binaural, steering and everything. So I think number one is now we’re like, Hey, did you check these items before you handed them the artists? Are you measuring them to make sure that the same every day that the ports aren’t blocked all that stuff? We’re still at a early stages of just building measurement into the routines for this stuff? So I think that’s part of it. I think, you know, another part of it is, you know, are we doing fit checks? I think I think I think, again, I’m not an engineer, but the lack of fit checks. I think a lot of people are just cranking these #$%*in’ things. Pardon my French, because there’s no isolation there. Oh.

Heather Malyuk 58:54
Well, this is the thing, though. So so we’re Lauren and I are very much on the other side of you, where we’re in the data collection phase for a lot of things. And Michael, I think, you know, my recent research on in your monitors with my colleague, Alex Midas, we’re going to be publishing it soon. But finding that okay, so you get a monitor engineer, right. And they might be able to measure output levels, but they say, well, these are these are isolating. So you know, their signal to noise ratio is better, they’ll be able to turn it down. And we say, well, what why do you think that? They say, well, the manufacturer told me it’s 26dB isolation across the board. Okay, well, that’s never been studied, you know. And so one of the things Alex and I were doing recently was looking at these isolation levels and finding zero dB isolation in the low frequencies, two DB isolation and output levels of over 143 dB SPL. And so, you know, audiologists I think when they when someone comes in and says, I want to be fit within your monitors, or they get called out to the venue, they have no clue. They have no clue what they’re doing to, potentially to the artists series or to the monitor engineers ears. And it’s it’s really the fault of our community for not studying it. To be perfectly frank, there are some of us who say, Well, we just we just know this because we work in the field. Well, that doesn’t help anybody. It doesn’t help other people rise to the occasion and fit people appropriately. It also does not help them monitor engineering community. And I’m curious if you think, you know, if the monitor engineer has a role in encouraging the musician to listen to at a lower level, or whose responsibility is it? Is it is it the audiologist,

Michael Lawrence 1:00:32
I yeah, I think the monitor engineer, I would say, I want that person to be educated and understand these issues, you have to be very, very, very, very careful what you say to a rock star about that, because you will be on a plane in 30 seconds, right. But for those who are artists who are willing to have that conversation, I want them on engineer to be able to be, you know, competent in those topics. And I do, I do, you know, mix a local band here, and they’re in their 50s, and their 60s. And so they’ve all got some hearing loss, and they’re actually I’ve seen some other audiograms. And so I’ll talk to them when they’re facing the other way. If you can hear me, you don’t have a good fit, you know what I mean? Like, I’ll just go just in conversational levels, if you can hear me talking to you with your ears in and that’s not, it’s not fitting, I think one of the things that I want a manager to be able to do is recognize the signs of a bad fit, I want them to recognize when someone’s really pitchy, all of a sudden, where they keep asking you for more, more, more, more more, that’s probably a sign that that they’re not sealing well. So a lot of monitor engineering, and we’ve talked about this on our show all the time is like one of my co hosts colleague calls Miss Cleo, right, you got to kind of figure out what’s going on in their head, and recognize or even their body language of when they’re not comfortable when artists can’t hear something like that. And so it is really difficult because you can’t be in their head, you can’t hear what they’re hearing, even if you’re wearing the same IEMs with them, you’re still not on a stage in front of a rock band, you still have the same fit that they have, you don’t have the same hearing loss that they have. So it’s really hard to put yourself in their shoes, but what we can do is recognize the signs of somebody not being comfortable. And when they’re not getting a good fit. I, you know, had a good relationship with my act, I said, Go get your hearing tested and bring the audiogram back and let’s let’s look at it. And that’s really rare. It’s very rare, and it’s so rare, you probably won’t be able to do that, you know,

Heather Malyuk 1:02:16
but but I mean for you to suggest that, you know, we we tell audiologists as music, audiologists we say well Don’t, don’t tell the audio engineer how to do their job, because that’s their job, it’s not our job, our job is,

Michael Lawrence 1:02:28
is so that you can equip that person to be so when my drummer goes against an audiogram, and he’s 45 db down at 8k. Now I go understand what you’re hitting your cymbals so hard now, and telling you not to hit him as hard is not going to be the answer here because you can’t hear it otherwise. So maybe I need to I need to put a you know, 10 DB boost at 4k in your in your monitors. And all of a sudden, you feel like you can hear it. So I want more information to be able to make a better decision. I think that’s, that’s a lot of it. And then and Laura and I talked about this just destigmatizing it I have now done two articles about this. I just did one last last month, I think for live sound and it’s on pro sound web and I went to go see Laura in her office and I put my audiogram in the article, you can go to personal web and see what my my thresholds are, ya know, so just just to get people used to this idea. It’s not a taboo anymore. Like yeah, like, this is something you should be thinking about ignoring the fact that you might have hearing loss doesn’t make your hearing loss go away. You know, you don’t have to tell anybody your data, you don’t have to share it, but you should know what it is. And you should be equipped. And you should have a conversation about what you can do to preserve what you have and take care of yourself. And so many live sound engineers are afraid of that. Yeah. And I think that’s an older, it’s an older generation thing, for the most part. And we are seeing and ask that. Yeah, well, I’m in a cool spot with what we’re doing with signal noise, because we have such a vibrant community and a lot of them are early career people. And so we are actually able to kind of set the tone a little bit for the next generation of sound engineers what we want them to be thinking about, and you know, so Dr. Frank shows up, he’s in our Discord server. And anytime there’s a hearing question he pops in and and we’re just so thrilled to have a real live audiologists there. We’re so thrilled about it, but there’s just there’s a there’s a real willingness for people that want to talk about this. They want to get the information so we’re not running from it. And I’m doing what I can, you know, like, I’ll publish my preference, I don’t care but, but a lot of it is, you know, Heather and we we’ve scheduled you to come on the show, man, we were just giddy with excitement for we’re like a doctor who’s coming on the show. We are so excited. And all the listeners are so excited. And so in general, our community and I think that the live sound community in general, we do want to know about this. We do want training, we do want information. I can’t guarantee that the artist is going to want to talk to me about it. But what we can do is realize that this is an integral part of our job, and we want to educate ourselves about it. And so there is there is a real willingness to understand this stuff. I do think and I think that’s a good It’s a good first step.

Heather Malyuk 1:05:01
I think it’s changing on the artist side, too. I was contacted by a management group, oh gosh, I don’t know, a few months, few months ago, gosh, maybe more like eight months ago, work with, they work with a lot of big bands who people would recognize. And the management contacted me to see if I would talk to people about hearing health. And so I’ve had some telehealth appointments with monitor engineers and their artists to learn about in your monitors safety, you know, how to have the ear impressions properly done that kind of thing. And I recently worked with a monitor engineer who was just the coolest, I went on site, did hearing tests on like, 10 different people talk to them. And he was explaining to me, and they were how he checks in with everyone every night and asks them, how are your ears feeling? Has your ringing changed? Are they tired at all? And he does these regular ear checks, even though I mean, he’s not an audiologist. He’s not checking your hearing. But he’s letting them know how important it is. And that was I had never heard of that before, to be honest. And now he’s top of my list for monitor engineers. And I said to him, how did you? How did you think to start doing this? Because he’s, he’s actually older. And he’s been doing it for a while. And he said that he had looked online, you know, tried to teach himself about sound levels and what would hurt ears and he doesn’t know what level the ears are. But he thought at the minimum, he can ask people how their hearing is. And if there’s a problem, you can call an audiologist. And I’m like, that is just the perfect place

Michael Lawrence 1:06:27
to start awareness. That was lovely. Yeah, it’s the same thing. You know, we’re not Rational Acoustics is like I said, we’re not SPL police, right? We’re not, we don’t, we’re not in the business of going in and telling people to turn their camera systems down. So we do, we’re in the business of bringing information to the table, you know, and explaining to people how to make good decisions. And you know, that that works. It really does, it really does work. When you go, Hey, if you’re buying, if you’re buying an audio analyzer, right, you clearly you’re in, you’re interested in getting data, that’s what it does, it gives you data. So by the fact that you went out and you bought this thing, and you got to your measuring microphone, you’re showing up to his show and saying, I want to get some data. So of course you care about that. And you’re interested in that. So we just need to help people to understand it. And that’s, I think that’s sort of the next step for us is NIOSH doses is is very important. But it’s not, it’s you can’t like mix to it in real time, right. So it’s not a good real time indicator for front of house engineer, if they should be turning up or turning down or whatever. We’ve done some cool stuff with like cascaded le cues at different lengths. So you can see your dynamic range and how long you’ve been in a certain level and color coding the meters. And also. So, you know, I think there’s more to do there. And we can acquire the data now, how do we frame it in a way that that is actionable? And then how do you get people used to these tools? So we do. There’s a big festival called Outside Lands, it’s out in California. And so in the last couple of years, Rational Acoustics has done the level monitoring for this. And that is primarily a nuisance noise thing. It’s about making sure that people around the festival in the neighborhood aren’t disturbed or minimizing the disturbance. But what we’ve done it since we’re there anyway, and we’re there putting levels up on screens in front of house anyway, is set it up in a way that we teach in our workshop about mixing for impact, lower levels over time, we set that whole thing up, even though that’s not why we’re there just to get people used to seeing it. And we talk to the front of house engineers that come out with a different bands. And we say this is why it’s laid out this way. And you know, and we do hear people go, Wow, this is really cool. Like, how do I get one of these like this is I need this, you know, this is great. And it’s really cool to see the experienced engineers learn how to call it Bob, and we’ve you know, you have, you can have a loud moment, you can go there, you just don’t want to camp out there. So a lot of it is just exposure, no pun intended, we just want people to get used to seeing these things. And I think the other thing is, we have had some pretty big name engineers sit in on our workshop in the past for no other reason than for them, the students to say, Oh, I’ve always looked up to an engineer, so and so. And he says, uh, he uses this stuff, too. And so it must be cool to do it. Like it’s, I’m not a really compelling case to go, you should turn down because who am I right? But I don’t really mix. But if you if there’s a mix engineer that you’ve grown up, idolizing. And you look up to and they’re saying, Yes, this is an important tool for me. And I’m very, very conscious about this. And here are some tricks that I use to achieve impact at lower levels. And yes, we agree with what you’re saying, like, oh, like for the students to hear that has been really helpful, also, because it’s kind of like, Hey, this is what the cool people are doing. Right? So So part of it is there’s gonna be a point when it flips, you know, 20 years ago, you were the odd man out if you had an audio analyzer, because no one was doing and now it’s really, really rare to go to a show. And if you see someone that doesn’t have one now they’re the odd man out. So we’re trying to make it the same thing and sound level monitoring and it’s happening where we want to get to a point where if you are going I don’t care about my levels, and I’m not watching him that’s going to put you in the minority. So there’s going to be a point when it flips and this stuff is becoming more common. And I would say most shows I go To now there’s meters. So it had his head in the right direction, but a lot of it is just getting people used to seeing this stuff, you know?

Laura Sinnott 1:10:07
Yeah. And one takeaway for audiologists might be if you do have that sound engineer patient who comes in which again, I know it’s rare, but it happens could just simply be about awareness. Hey, did you know do you use Smaart? Did you know there’s an SPL section that can help you with monitoring the sound levels? And there are there’s, there are courses that can teach you how to use it, like even just saying that could be one piece of information that perhaps that sound engineer didn’t know?

Michael Lawrence 1:10:32
Yeah. Yeah, it’s been, I think, the just real quick, the, I talked about the Muppet Movie in my workshop, right. And there’s Kermit, Fozzie. This is gonna be a fork in the road, there’s a huge fork in the road when they get there. And so the fork in the road for this is that your ears can’t tell you about SPL? Right. So your your loudness, perception does not tell you whether or not it’s safe. So, so getting people used to this idea of use your ears for loudness and use a meter for SPL, they’re not the same thing. It’s totally possible, like I’m totally comfortable right now. And for it to be dangerous. And it’s totally possible for you to be like, I’m super uncomfortable, it feels too loud. But for not to be dangerous. We have to start there. Everything else we’re going to talk about about how to use these tool sets, you have to be sold on the idea that the meter is what determines, you know, what level is safe and out of your ears, your ears aren’t really well equipped for that for all the reasons that we talked about perception. So So there’s been a massive if you get an audio textbook, and you pull it off the shelf, and I’ve got a bunch here, if that book is older than 10 years or so, read what it says about SPL It’s crazy inaccurate. We’ve just been, you know, talking about Fletcher Munson since 1931. And it’s just like, come on, like. So we part of this has been breaking these things that have just been re propagated over and over and over again and are not true or were never true, or, like we talked about the research, but part of it is to get people to stop spreading stuff. It’s not true. Battle for us is just hey, stop saying that. Like, I’ll give you one example. Because I see it all the time. It’s even though World Health Organizations didn’t see waiting is representative of the tonality of human hearing at concert levels. No, it’s not look at the 100 phons curve, and put it on a chart with C weighting, they are not the same. They’re not even close to being the same. We need to stop saying that. Right. So so things like that are in every book. And so of course you read the book. And now this is the thing that you know, because you read it in a book and people who write books must know what they’re talking about. Right? But it’s very well, yeah, I mean, I’m sure there’s you know, I found two typos so far. But yeah, that’s that’s a real part of it is, is breaking these things that we’ve all accepted as true for so long. We have to get past that before we can talk about what’s actually true.

Heather Malyuk 1:12:45
It’s an uphill battle in audiology to me, especially with the in ear monitor stuff. I mean, it’s just we see misinformation after misinformation. And we’re like, When will this ever change? And we were stoked that one day it will

Michael Lawrence 1:12:59
like that one’s been around for a long time to the bass, bass can’t hurt you low frequencies can’t hurt you- Yes, they can. But we still have a lot of data on that yet. Because it’s a new, you know, it’s a newer thing. So. So, as we learn more about this, we have to be very aware that a lot of the stuff that we’re going to encounter is either incorrect or outdated, and just not rolling that forward again, and again, is that’s a tough cycle to break. But it’s important here.

Laura Sinnott 1:13:25
Yeah, I know. We’ve been talking for a long time, but I just have a couple quick questions. And they’re kind of

Michael Lawrence 1:13:32
out here. Let’s do it. Okay.

Laura Sinnott 1:13:34
Your articles have been described as geeky, I think fair, by who? By the internet. Internet.

Michael Lawrence 1:13:42
Oh, dear. Oh,

Laura Sinnott 1:13:43
by, Laura. I see I see geeky all the time when I was doing some, you know, preparation for this podcast. But some of your artists, it’s not just geeky, geeky is only one component. I’m gonna read off some titles of articles you’ve written and then if you can tell me an article, maybe like a favorite article or some article you particularly liked. No cable left behind a process for avoiding system problems from the outset. Flying wrenches being uncomfortable with getting too comfortable? Don’t phase me, bro. Do double patch channels and oxide software subwoofers cost these issues and then the magnitude fallacy. So anyway, I just want people to know there’s some pretty cool articles out there written by Michael Lawrence which you can read any favorites Michael

Michael Lawrence 1:14:26
read our so our editor at personal web Keith Clark, he’s responsible for a lot of what we sow the subtitle of these articles what we call the deck in the business called the deck and he writes a lot of those I was doing this thing for a long time where everything was like a like a song or movie title parody that I was doing but don’t don’t phaze me Barrows right after that guy is going through the TSA and was saying don’t don’t tase me browser for security. Right. So I wrote it right after that, and I’m absolutely shocked that he let me keep the article but I was so proud of it. But my favorite one of all I’m, I was writing an article about how when you clip it when you clip it away for me change its frequency content. And so in the article I was doing a demonstration of you take, if you take a sine wave and you clip it hard enough, you end up eventually with the square wave. Yeah. And so the name of the article was clipped to be square and not as funny except for me, but I’m doing it.

Laura Sinnott 1:15:25
Good for ya. I used to have digital auditory audio processing students and be a good mnemonic for them to kind of remember that the same way

Heather Malyuk 1:15:33
that we have to ask about more favorites, too. We’ve mentioned Signal to Noise several times. And just to reiterate, it’s a it’s a podcast that you’re a co host of, and it’s much more than that. It’s a community. Like I’m part of the Facebook group. And I just love I just love the conversations that happen in there. And I feel weird asking you this, but he was one of your favorite guests.

Michael Lawrence 1:15:54
Oh, oh, boy. You know, it’s kind of crazy, because we’ve done so many of them. We’ve got like 170, something like that. I really liked the stuff like what you were talking about? Because it’s different. It’s not we’ve talked to Nick’s engineering or mix engineer, we’ve had some super iconic people like Robert Scoble that makes like prince. And Tom, you know, you have these just huge heavy hitters that if you’re in the live audio community, you’ve grown up seeing these people looking up to these people. And it’s really been cool to talk to all those. But I really like this stuff that that we don’t get to do. I like talking to audiologists, I like talking to the lady who does sound for the NASA broadcast, you know what I mean? Like that stuff that you’re like, wow, I had never thought about that. And so we do get these things that are kind of out of the box a little bit, or just a different perspective. And and those have been, those have been my favorites, for sure.

Heather Malyuk 1:16:42
I think that answer. I know, it’s actually really good answer. You had a guest on recently, I was just trying to see if I could find the podcasts on my phone, Hannah. I think she was you were a mentor of hers, or Yeah, it’s a really good one.

Michael Lawrence 1:16:54
You want to talk about a success story. She walked up to me in an AES show in 2019 as a student in audio student, and she said I want to work for Rational Acoustics. And I said, Okay, you know, and we’re a tiny company, there’s like, 11 of us, right? We’re just not, we’re not that big. And so that’s, you know, that’s kind of like go into your, your dad, and when you’re in high school and be like, I want to be in the NBA and you gotta go, you know, what percentage of people actually, you know, it’s just, it’s just the odds of you getting a job at a company that only employs 11 People are not big. But she did. And she worked really hard. And she works fresh, because it’s now you know, I loved hearing her story. Yeah, she’s

Heather Malyuk 1:17:25
got to listen to that, or you should for audiologists listening to this podcast, I highly recommend I listen to all the signal to noise podcasts. Now, it’s become one of my favorite shows also, because you guys are really fun to listen to. But there’s so much we can learn from listening to the conversations you guys have on your show. So I would encourage any audiologist listening to listen to these conversations with audio engineers and learn listen and learn a little bit. So thank you for the work you guys are doing.

Michael Lawrence 1:17:54
Oh, I mean, it’s it’s a treat for us to you know, it’s not the thing that is we we are we are not set out to like, teach people anything, it’s not like, listen, we’re we are students of this and we are kind of along for the ride to with our guests. And like, Let’s just hear about your experiences and your perspective. And so I think we’ve learned so much by doing it, you know, and it’s it’s cool that other people choose to listen in. But that was never about it. For me, it was just about like, I want to I want to hear whatever he’s got to say, you know, I’ve been I’ve been very kind of like a kid in a candy shop with it.

Laura Sinnott 1:18:24
Well, to close out, Michael, because this is again, an audience of audiologists, do you have anything you’d like to close out with just because you have so many audiology ears listening to you right now?

Michael Lawrence 1:18:37
You know what I, I would say that, I would like to see kind of more bridges being built, you know, like, if you’re not, if you’re at a show come by for a house and say hi, those types of things. If you have friends that are in live audio, like call them up and ask about the stuff. And from the beginning of setting this topic, you know, the majority issue hasn’t been that we that the information didn’t exist. It’s just been that the wires were not connected, you know, and people knew stuff, but they want to talk to the other people who wanted to know the stuff. So I just want to I want to see more cross pollination. I guess, you know,

Laura Sinnott 1:19:14
I love that. That’s so that’s such a great thought to end on.

Michael Lawrence 1:19:18
Yeah, well, thank you. It’s very nice. And also Laura, thank you for the grilled cheese placee recommendation because Oh, yeah, yeah. Well,

Laura Sinnott 1:19:25
I think I saw somewhere too. You have some like little line, it might be your website or something that says you’d like tacos, but maybe like, the grilled cheese will start to

Michael Lawrence 1:19:36
I don’t know. I mean, it’ll take a lot. You know, it’s kind of one of those like, it’s really hard to have credibility on the internet. Like, you know, you’re gonna get it, you’re on a forum, like you’re not going to convince anybody that you know anything and you probably shouldn’t, it’s fine. So I just started like, bypassing the whole thing how to identify myself because everyone’s like, Oh, I’m a pro. Whatever. It’s like, I put taco enthusiast I don’t care if you think I know what I’m talking about doesn’t make a difference to me. I’m not gonna try to convince you of anything. I like tacos. You know.

Laura Sinnott 1:20:02
For anybody who is in central New York state there is a grilled cheese shop called about compound and Utica New York and it is pretty.

Heather Malyuk 1:20:10
It is awesome. Yes. That’s really good. Nice. Thanks for being with us today. Michael, this was Thank you for having me. Yeah.

Laura Sinnott 1:20:16
Thank you so much.