A Portable, Cheap, and Effective Vocal Booth for the Travelling Podcaster

I’m one the hosts of the Software Engineering Radio podcast (which you should listen to, if you don’t already ;)), and recently I found myself in a bit of difficult situation: I had an interview booked that I didn’t want to move, but I was asked by my client to go to one of their offices abroad to meet some of their external partners.

That meant I had to do the interview from my hotel room. Unfortunately, hotel rooms, usually, have plenty of reverb, which can make the sound of the recording really unpleasant, and be very difficult (or impossible) to remove during post-production.

I needed a solution that was cheap, light, and that would take not too much space in my suitcase.

Googling to find if a solution existed, I discovered that several people had the same problem, but none of them had a good solution—they only had flimsy contraptions mostly made using chairs, luggage racks, pillows, and blankets (we’ll see that the use of pillows and blankets is actually an excellent idea).

After lots of googling and thinking, inspiration struck me—I thought I could build one using some PVC rigid conduits cut to create a frame in the shape of a cuboid, then put the pillows and the blankets, found in the room, around it to create a vocal booth—pillows, blankets, and clothes can be very effective in reducing reverb.

Here is the frame assembled in the hotel room:

Here are the materials I used, with links to where I bought them from, for your reference:

I cut each conduit in four parts: three 55cm long, and one 35cm long. I chose those lengths because 55cm was the longest that I could fit in my suitcase. You can see in the picture above how I assembled the booth—with the conduit couplers used to join the 35cm and the 55cm parts together to form the long sides.

I assembled the booth on the bed to reduce the reverb from below, as well. My laptop is a 16″ MacBook Pro M3, which is very, very quiet (I’ve never heard its fan in action). If you have a laptop with a noisy fan, you may want to change your setup—to avoid the microphone picking the noise—perhaps by keeping the laptop behind the booth, and using one external monitor (like the one below), as well as an external keyboard and mouse (or trackpad).

Here are some images of the booth, after I added the blankets and the pillows to prepare it for the interview.

Front side

Left side

Right side

Back side

And this is me during the interview 🙂

Here are a couple of recordings in the same place in the same untreated room—the first outside the vocal booth and the second one inside it—so that you can hear the difference the booth makes. Both recording are with the same audio setup, including gain and microphone. The differences can be heard more easily by wearing some headphones.

This is the one recorded outside the vocal booth

And this is the one inside the vocal booth

Let me know what you think, and if you find the solution useful.

ACCU 2010 conference keynotes announced

The names of the ACCU 2010 conference (14-17 April 2010, Oxford, UK) keynote speakers are now public

  • Jeff Sutherland, co-creator of Scrum
  • James Bach, well-known software tester
  • Dan North, Agile coach, programmer, and inventor of Behaviour Driven Development
  • Russel Winder, author, trainer, and expert in parallel and distributed programming

As usual, the conference will feature some pre-conference tutorials:

  • A Certified Scrum Master course by Jeff Sutherland and Gabrielle Benefield (the Monday and Tuesday before the conference)
  • An introduction to the D programming language by Walter Bright and Andrei Alexandrescu
  • A course on software testing by James Bach

There is also a twitter account you can follow for updates: @accu2010.

The full programme will be announced shortly. It promises to be as exciting as ever–being the conference chair I know that for sure 😉

London XPDay 2009

The London XPDay is one of the oldest, and, in my very biased opinion, one of the very best international conferences on agile software development.

This year’s programme includes some great sessions. However, I think some very interesting ones will materialise in the open-space sessions (which make bulk of the programme) for which all the delegates will be able to propose the topics that interest them most and, if there is enough interest from other attendees, lead a session.

All the previous editions have been very successful, and most people always left with some new insights.

There are still some places available. Hurry up and book yours here—it is exceptionally good value for money.