Steelyard Festival Finsbury Park

Summer has officially arrived now that Media Technology students have headed out to the first festival of the season – Steelyard at Finsbury Park. A small team attended with Vanguardia acoustic consultancy to help with noise monitoring at the event. Contra to popular belief acoustic consultants are there to help the sound engineers to get the most out of their systems and to provide the best possible experience to the punters. They don’t make creative decisions but are invaluable in offering advice of how to control levels across the spectrum. It requires a good understanding of the properties of sound including how it travels and can be manipulated both electronically and acoustically. Of course there is also a large amount of responsibility associated with the role as the noise off-site is restricted by legislation and it is the responsibility of the acoustic consultants to ensure that the conditions of the event license are not breached.

Media Technology students were primarily there monitoring levels across the site and identifying sources of noise to feed back to the consultants. Vanguardia are fantastic at involving the students at every stage, though, and allowed them to shadow other roles too. Jonty Stewart, Senior Acoustic Consultant with Vanguardia commented “They did it all! Measuring levels on and off-site, setting up and calibrating equipment, managing engineers to make sure they stayed below their allocated limits... really professional team!”

It sounds like the event went well. The Steelyard is an epic venue and, more importantly, kept the sound contained much better than expected. Jonty was keen to praise the support and teamwork offered by the students. We look forward to further work with Jonty and Vanguardia throughout the summer.