IEEE Women in Engineering - December 2019 - 20

the end, they had a set of speakers that,
Shumate says, "sounds really great for the
price we put into them." Later, in high
school, while working on Edward Albee's
Box, Shumate decided that she wanted
explosive sound effects with extremely low
frequency. She needed a subwoofer but
there were two problems: they couldn't fit
a subwoofer into the available space, and it
wasn't in the budget. Shumate built one
for the space herself, and the subwoofer, which provided the loud bass
Shumate was looking for, was
named Annie.

signer, and lighting designer, which was
Shumate's role.

Innovating With Theatrical Sound
Shumate designed this speaker rigged
into the set for CMU's Imaginarium
project. Credit goes to Maggie Quigley
for the scenic design.

electives within Integrative Design, Arts,
and Technology (IDeATe), an interdisciplinary program unique to CMU that encourages students to use STEM
to push the boundaries of
What
creativity. IDeATe offers
if sounds
minors and courses in
Combining Coding
could creep up
game design, animaWith Sound
tion and special efIn high school, Shuon the audience,
fects, media design,
mate began teaching
whisper in their ears,
and sonic arts, among
herself the basics of
or appear to move
others. Within IDeATe,
computer coding,
through the
Shumate has access to
including taking Adcrowd?
a plethora of technolovanced Placement comgies. "They've got everything
puter science her senior
from 3D printing and laser cutyear, and she quickly began
ting to Arduinos and microcontrollers
incorporating that work into theater.
to visual media.... They have VR and AR
That year, she wrote a program to read
projection mapping and motion tracking,"
in a spreadsheet of the characters in each
Shumate notes.
scene and then output the console conWhile her first semester as a freshfiguration files that could be loaded into
man included classes in general theater
the digital soundboard.
technology, theater design, theater manToday, Shumate is a sophomore at
agement, and even studio art, where she
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Pittsfocused on drawing, drafting, crafting, and
burgh, studying sound design under the
designing projects, during her second semajor of theatrical design and production.
mester she participated in Imaginarium,
CMU, a prestigious university well known
where groups of theater students create a
for its computer science and theater pronew three-minute theatrical experience.
grams, is a perfect fit for Shumate, since it
Each student in the group is assigned roles,
has one of the only theatrical media design
including production designer, scenic decurricula in the United States. She takes

As a sound designer, Shumate played with
innovative ways to bring sound to the audience. What if the audience wore headphones that enabled them to hear live
sound effects? Shumate designed headphones that could change an audience
member's voice and play it back in real
time, distorted to make the person sound
smaller or larger, although budget constraints prevented the headphones from
making it into the final production.
In the summer of 2019, Shumate traveled to Prague, Czech Republic, for the
Prague Quadrennial, the largest theatrical
design conference in the world. There, she
attended lectures on subjects such as biology and psychoacoustics or how we can harness our instinctual reactions to different
kinds of sounds to better create compelling
and emotional sound designs for theater.
Her favorite presentation was by Bobby
McElver, a sound designer from New York
who is a pioneer in wave field synthesis. "If
you put tiny speakers close together, you
can mathematically reproduce sound as if
it is coming from a different location: like
a hologram," Shumate explains. "You can
have the sound of a cello coming from the
middle of the room when the middle of the
room is bare."
Shumate, always looking for new
and creative ways for audiences to experience sound, is interested in this
spatial-audio concept, where sound can
move throughout a space in seemingly
impossible ways. What if sounds could
creep up on the audience, whisper in
their ears, or appear to move through
the crowd? Next up, she will attempt to
try to gather funding to build a system
of her own.
-Katianne Williams is a freelance
writer specializing in the
technology field.

This panoramic view shows Shumate's workstation as board operator of the 2018
CMU production of The Way Out West. The sound designer was Anthony Stultz.

IEEE WOMEN IN ENGINEERING MAGAZINE

DECEMBER 2019

IEEE Women in Engineering - December 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Women in Engineering - December 2019