Why am I writing this? Is anyone actually going to read this? Maybe I should just let this section of my site remain empty. It could be my small way of avoiding contributing to the degradation of the web’s signal-to-noise ratio.

Nah…

I’ve been thinking about starting a blog for years, but haven’t actually sat down to do it until now. So what am I going to write about? Why should you take the time to read it? Hmm… let’s see…

I’ll usually be writing from at least one of two perspectives:

  1. an academic
  2. a live sound engineer

      

Having conducted academic research for over 10 years now (and taught for over 5), I’ve noticed that a lot of research findings get nicely communicated in journal or conference papers and are then (usually) forgotten.

Research papers are usually written with highly-technical language, requiring an advanced degree to really understand. There’s no need for this, as most papers are actually describing work that is, in reality, based around an extremely simple concept. It just looks more impressive to decorate the work with complicated equations and dense language. The reviewers love that stuff.

While this is all well and good in academia (I’m completely guilty of playing this game at times), this approach doesn’t help to communicate important work to a wider audience.

This is where I put on my live sound engineer hat.

I’ve worked professionally in live sound since around 2003. Work in the industry long enough and you notice two things:

  1. there’s a huge amount of misinformation swirling about
  2. many engineers have great ideas, just no time to try them out

I’ve experienced both of these points first-hand.

This might be a rare example of both points… it sounded surprisingly good!

So… I think what I’m getting at is that I want to use this blog to repackage my research so that it’s understandable by industry professionals who don’t have the time to digest dense academic publications. I also might have a rant or two…

I’ll do my best to write in plain English (but you’re going to have to give me a little leeway… I’ve been living in the UK for 10 years, so my language is a bit of a mash-up between American and British English) and to keep the entries short and to the point (unlike this one).

An image of my first draft of this post…

I hope these will be useful to someone out there, but if I’m just talking to my self, that’s cool too.

Expect one of of these every week (or so). If one doesn’t appear after a while, send a search party.