"It's Horrible To Go To A Concert With An Audio Engineer"

Ed Spoto helms Crossroads Audio, which provides many of the mics, PAs, lighting systems and rigs you see at local shows and festivals. Locally, his client list includes acts like Bowling For Soup, Erykah Badu, The Denton Blues Festival and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra.

Nationally, Spoto, his wife Ashley (who runs the books and more) and the Crossroads crew have been involved in sound and lighting for Bonnaroo, Austin City Limits Music Festival and tons more. He's a pretty reputable live recording engineer as well, and quite an irreverent critic with very eclectic tastes in local music, making for an interesting sit down.

You've been known to say, "I hate people and I hate music." True?

To be fair, I do not hate people, just douchebag posers. And I don't hate music, just the Auto-tuned songs. I used to be a runner for my promoter uncle in Tampa when I was 16. I learned pretty quickly to avoid being star struck! Seeing diva demands of has-been or never-were "artists" shaped my view of the industry.

Your first live sound job in town was with Showco, and you hopped on some pretty big tours. You mind namedropping?
Within three months of starting there, I was on tour with Soundgarden. By the end of the fall, I was on The Rolling Stones Voodoo Lounge tour. I started working my way up the audio ladder: Tech, systems engineer, monitors and front of house. I've also toured with Live, James Taylor, The Moody Blues, Lisa Loeb, Carlos Santana, George Strait and the Dixie Chicks to name a few.

I understand Lisa Loeb is one of your favorite Dallas artists. Are there any more?

I'm a fan of the Freddie Jones Jazz Quartet, Lisa Loeb, and Rigor Mortis.

You've heard an awful lot of local and national, acts live. What does music need more of? Less of? How about the local music community itself?

No more whistling, no more Auto-tune and lots more melody. More CDs, less digital mp3 sound bites. Additionally, just as there are high schools with focuses on alternative careers and job training, there is a need for education infrastructure to create talented audio engineers. Emphasis needs to be placed on critical listening skills for engineers, so live mixes do not sound like mp3 recordings. With the amount of volume capable in today's PA systems, an emphasis needs to be placed on quality and not decibel quantity. A third of all students entering college have permanent hearing loss. We need to save these ears!

Speaking of schools, which ones taught you?

I was raised in Tampa, and I loved tinkering with electronics and toys at a young age. My father brought home a reel-to-reel recorder from Vietnam filled with Joan Baez, Beatles, Kensington Trio, numerous jazz standards like Miles Davis. I went to Vanderbilt in Nashville and got an electrical engineering degree, fully knowing that I wouldn't ever be an electrical engineer. After I graduated from Vanderbilt, I attended Full Sail in Orlando, and earned my associates degree.

Do you still go to concerts on your own time? Do you even have any free time running a place like this?

I don't go to concerts unless I have a friend to see, really. It's horrible to go to a concert with an audio engineer because all they do is mentally re-tweak the system instead of just sitting back and enjoying it!

LED Lights Used in Plant Growth Experiments for Deep Space Missions

Gioia Massa, a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow in the Surface Systems group of Kennedy's Engineering Directorate, works on this AES Habitation-related Project.

For this experiment, Massa said they looked at the responses of a red leaf lettuce called "Outredgeous" and radish plants to different light sources -- broad spectrum fluorescent lighting and solid state red and blue LED lighting.

"LED lights are efficient and versatile," Massa said. "Because of their durability and long life, they are ideal for space missions where resupply of things from Earth is limited."

According to Dr. Ray Wheeler, lead for advanced life support activities in the Engineering Directorate, using LED lights to grow plants was an idea that originated with NASA as far back as the late 1980s.

Some of the first NASA-funded tests were done at the University of Wisconsin and at Kennedy using wheat and just red LEDs. Wheeler said the wheat plants were very leggy and almost bleached out.

"Blue LEDs weren't very good back then, so using blue fluorescent lights helped correct those problems," Wheeler said. "Today's LEDs have vastly improved in their efficiency."

Dr. Matthew Mickens, a graduate of North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University and recipient of the NASA-sponsored Harriett G. Jenkins Predoctoral Fellowship, followed the plants' growth during his tenure at the center.

During a recent harvest of the plants, Mickens measured the plants' shoot length, the shoot diameter, total fresh mass or the weight of the plants at time of harvest, total dry mass of the edible plant matter accumulated during the growth cycle, and the leaf area index.

He used a chlorophyll meter to measure chlorophyll content. Then Mickens flash-froze some of the plants in liquid nitrogen and ground them to a powder in order to perform a new test, an adenosine triphosphate analysis, which measures stored energy in the plant tissue.

"One of the objectives of the study was to understand the effects of green light on plant growth," Mickens said.

For the test, he compared the growth responses of the lettuce and radishes grown under a treatment of red and blue LEDs, and a treatment of broad spectrum white fluorescent lamps with green light present.

"I discovered that there were considerable physiological differences between the two treatments," Mickens said.

According to Mickens, results showed darker red color under the red and blue LEDs, which indicates a higher concentration of anthocyanin, a powerful antioxidant that can combat some of the effects of cosmic radiation. Additional replications of the crop cycles are currently ongoing to further confirm these observations.

"Even subtle changes in light quality can potentially increase antioxidant properties of crops such as the lettuce used here," Mickens said. "The nutritional quality of the vegetables meant to feed our astronaut explorers can be controlled by proper selection of lighting used to grow these crops during long range space missions beyond low Earth orbit."

There is evidence that supports fresh foods, such as tomatoes, blueberries and red lettuce are a good source of antioxidants, according to Wheeler.

"How they are grown and then consumed in space could have a positive impact on people's moods and could protect against radiation in closed environments," Wheeler said.