A new home for the Department of Performance Studies. I was fortunate to have been brought in on the planing stages since 2007, and we were able to arrange for several features laying the ground for efficient and innovative performance experiences for posterity. Features include:

Each program (Music  and Theatre Arts) has:

• 2 dedicated classrooms
• 2 rehearsal rooms (including one light lab)
• 1 computer laboratory

The building also features:

• a new black box theater, almost double the size of the old one, with a catwalk around all sides
• courtyard accommodating performance
• prestigious location on the green, opposite administration building

Other exciting developments:

• Both computer laboratories doubled in capacity (or more)
• The recording studio suite grew 50% in area, adding an isolation/vocal room and a 15 foot ceiling in the large recording room.
• While growth of other spaces is modest, it is significant that where most of our old facilities served many purposes, there is a separate room for each purpose in the new building, and growth of the labs can mean enlarging or adding sections of some courses.
• We’re all in one building. When I started at TAMU, we were in 7 buildings.
• “Ultra High Def” specification surround speaker system in the black box, 22.2 speakers
• Proper construction for sound isolation in studio, rehearsal and practice rooms, and performing faculty offices
• 5.1 surround sound in both music classrooms
• 5.1 surround in the studio control room, and the studio recording rooms double as a stereo workstation and a 10-channel surround workstation for post-production and rehearsing surround performances, all with ultrasonic frequency range

And now for some relevant quotes from Francis Bacon’s “New Atlantis” (1627):

“We have also sound-houses, where we practise and demonstrate all sounds, and their generation. We have harmonies which you have not, of quarter-sounds, and lesser slides of sounds. Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have, together with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We represent small sounds as great and deep; likewise great sounds extenuate and sharp; we make divers tremblings and warblings of sounds, which in their original are entire. We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices and notes of beasts and birds. We have certain helps which set to the ear do further the hearing greatly. We have also divers strange and artificial echoes, reflecting the voice many times, and as it were tossing it: and some that give back the voice louder than it came, some shriller, and some deeper; yea, some rendering the voice differing in the letters or articulate sound from that they receive. We have also means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances.”

“We have also perspective-houses, where we make demonstrations of all lights and radiations; and of all colours: and out of things uncoloured and transparent, we can represent unto you all several colours; not in rain-bows, (as it is in gems, and prisms,) but of themselves single. We represent also all multiplications of light, which we carry to great distance, and make so sharp as to discern small points and lines. Also all colourations of light; all delusions and deceits of the sight, in figures, magnitudes, motions, colours all demonstrations of shadows. We find also divers means, yet unknown to you, of producing of light originally from divers bodies. We procure means of seeing objects afar off; as in the heaven and remote places; and represent things near as afar off; and things afar off as near; making feigned distances. We have also helps for the sight, far above spectacles and glasses in use. We have also glasses and means to see small and minute bodies perfectly and distinctly; as the shapes and colours of small flies and worms, grains and flaws in gems, which cannot otherwise be seen, observations in urine and blood not otherwise to be seen. We make artificial rain-bows, halo’s, and circles about light. We represent also all manner of reflexions, refractions, and multiplications of visual beams of objects.”