When it comes to sustainability, technical people can understand it as a problem to solve with design and engineering. It can be about power consumption, longevity, updateability, packaging, and support that doesn’t involve rolling trucks. Sustainability is often good for users, as shown in our story about the Massive Attack and d&b partnership on a tour that was years in the making. It’s an example of a better footprint for live music–a high-carbon activity that none of us want to give up even to save the planet. The same research that made the tour lower energy also made the trucks lighter, the load in/out more standardized, and the noise overspill better managed, so sustainability is a three-dimensional idea.
The other component of sustainability is people–to carry our industry well into the future. In my decades in AV, there’s been a perennial fear of running out of people. So how do we attract more members of our tribe? This is on my mind as my daughter is getting an EE degree; her class at a well-respected University of California School of Engineering is just 7% female.
With this in mind, this week Meyer Sound introduced Katherine “Katie” Murphy Khulusi to my inbox. She is the youngest Senior Engineering Director, Loudspeaker Development in Meyer Sound’s history.
Like my daughter, Murphy Khulusi was a musician as a child, first saxophone, then oboe (my daughter was flute, then trumpet). Like many of us in this industry, Murphy Khulusi was in theater club. Surprise! She saw a connection between the major in engineering she would get and the live performance she loved.
“I describe it as a science until it’s an art,” she says, “because there’s so much we know about physics and math as it relates to acoustics, but there are a lot of elements we don’t fully understand—we just know that every time you measure it, it works that way. And we need to try to replicate that and make it happen every time.
“I’d like to think that one of the things that I bring to the table is I’ve had all of these interesting cinema and live sound event experiences, be they live or recorded, which have given me an understanding of everything, from wanting to be able to have my art replicated exactly as I am putting it out, to the audience’s expectations, to practical concerns like what fits the budget, what fits in the truck, what is easy to put up and take down. So I really think of myself as the person who is putting the puzzle pieces together. I’m never going to know the most about any of these individual puzzle pieces, but I can see the whole puzzle.” As she said that, I remembered feeling exactly that way on site when I was designing theme parks.
Like many young engineers, Murphy Khulusi wants to ask new questions. She doesn’t want to only repeat what has worked but use modern technology to find things we couldn’t see before. She sees that as a human opportunity too, where the diversity of AV experiences is supported by the diversity of the people who design them. That’s really the definition of sustainability because it carries the industry we value forward.
