Sound advice from Vanguardia

Students from across the media technology programme got together on Wednesday 8 March for a talk by Warren King from Vanguardia Consulting.

Vanguardia provide a range of electroacoustic and acoustic services to a wide range of industries, but Warren came to talk specifically about environmental monitoring and assessment for music festivals. There were plenty of entertaining anecdotes from Warren’s decade of experience and undergraduates and graduates were also able to contribute their experiences of working with Warren and other companies. The students benefitted from their insights into some of the technical and political considerations that are vital to running successful events. Students were also introduced to some of the innovations within the industry, such as correlation detectors to automatically locate and eliminate problematic sources of noise.

The talk was organised to further Solent’s long-standing and symbiotic relationship with Vanguardia. Warren largely came to recruit more students to work in noise monitoring at festivals over the summer. He commented, “Solent has been a great source for engineers as they have acquired many of the skills we are looking for.  The media technology students have 100 times more experience than several other courses.”

There are a number of graduates currently employed at Vanguardia, whom Warren describes as "invaluable". Graduate Mike Ledbetter also came to the talk. Mike works for another company but firmly believes his experience with Vanguardia during his time at Solent directly led to his current employment. It was also a pleasure to be joined by former media technology lecturer Jonty Stewart, who now runs Wight Noise and attended as a consultant for Vanguardia.

It was great to see all three year groups so well represented and showing such interest in this large yet often understated sub-sector of the live sound scene. We’re sure they’ll have plenty of fun over the summer and learn a lot whilst doing so.