John Breitmeier approaches Brooks Center productions as a musician and a scientist
May 2008
John Breitmeier likes to keep his left brain and right brain busy – and patrons of the Brooks Center for the Performing Arts can be thankful for that.
Breitmeier, the center’s production intern, is serious about sound. With degrees in physics and performing arts, he comes at it as a scientist and as a musician. He has studied acoustics and wave properties and he also knows what it’s like to be in the orchestra pit during a major production.
“I need the two opposite ends of the spectrum to keep me balanced,” he says. “My creative side needs to be explored in music and live sound and artistic expression, and I also need to work out my rational mind with physics and hard problems.”
That’s a boon to the Brooks Center, says production supervisor Woody Moore.
“Having someone with his experience as a musician and his background in science has been a tremendous advantage,” Moore says. “John is uniquely qualified, and he’s also one of the hardest workers I’ve ever met.”
A year ago, Breitmeier might have been bored in the production intern position, Moore says, but over the summer a state-of-the-art sound system was installed in the Brooks Center’s 1,000-seat main theater. “John was excited to come back (after graduation in May 2007) and play with these new toys.”
The new Meyer system has two curvilinear line arrays, each with 10 speakers, suspended above the proscenium.
“By placing those speakers close together in a curve, you get the waves of sound to group together so it functions as one giant speaker,” Breitmeier says. “You can get even sound distribution across the whole room, or by tilting the speakers, you can tune the system so the sound shoots to different parts of the room.”
Driven by a new electrical power system designed to eliminate the low-frequency buzz that plagues sound systems plugged into standard power, the theater’s sound system is now able to produce sound clearly up to well over 100 decibels. “Before we were straining to get 70 or 80,” Breitmeier says. “The amps and speakers aren’t having to work as hard, so you’ve got a lot more realistic sound reproduction.”
Moore has likened the Brooks Center’s sound upgrade to switching from a Volkswagen to a Ferrari. Breitmeier is usually at the controls – a soundboard console at the rear of the theater – unless he’s sitting with the symphony, as he has for a couple of musical productions.
He’s just as likely to pitch in on any aspect of the center’s hectic activities.
“We had a touring group of ‘Gypsy’ come in this year with three semis – 53-foot flatbeds loaded with props, sets, draperies and costumes,” Breitmeier says. It was 20 hours of work for one performance.
The Brooks Center, which also houses a black box theater and a recital hall, presents about 100 events a year, from lectures to performances by the university’s dance, theater and music ensembles.
Breitmeier, a native of Melbourne, Fla., followed his older brother and sister to Clemson. As a student, he typically carried an overload of courses and played in several music ensembles every semester. By commencement in May 2007, he had earned a B.A. in performing arts and a B.S. in physics, with a minor in chemistry. For his senior paper in physics, he compared musical tuning systems using mathematical modeling.
Now as the production intern, he continues to play saxophone with the university’s jazz ensemble. He learned to weld so he could build cable carts and storage racks for the theater.
It’s that right-brain, left-brain thing again. Or as he puts it: “I bounce around from one thing to another a lot.” Including his career plans.
“Right now I’m interested in speaker design,” says Breitmeier, “because it’s a new tangent for me to go off on.”
Read more about academic studies in performing arts and physics.
Karl Hill, public information director for academic communications and marketing, can be reached at karlh@clemson.edu or
(864) 656-0937.