Alexandria Perryman

Audio engineer,
Nasa’s Johnson Space Center

“Within NASA one of my biggest goals is, whenever we go back to the moon, to be able to mix the first show of people talking on the moon. Just knowing I’m mixing audio coming from the moon would be awesome.”

July 3, 2020
interview by Madeleine Campbell for Women in Sound
portrait by Maggie Negrete
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Alex Perryman’s job is literally out of this world. As an Emmy-award winning audio engineer at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, she mixes audio feeds from astronauts currently aboard the International Space Station and restores and preserves the recorded audio of astronauts from decades past. In addition, Alex engineers, edits and produces NASA’s weekly program Houston, We Have a Podcast. One of her goals is to eventually mix the audio feeds of astronauts communicating from the moon. In June, Women in Sound chatted with Alex about her work in broadcasting, podcasting and audio archival.

What’s your title at NASA?
I wear many different hats within the scope of audio, but they just call me an audio engineer. 

It seems like your work involves broadcast, podcast and archival, all of which on their own are entirely separate specialties. 
Yes, definitely. From the broadcast standpoint, we do a lot of interviews with media outlets and educators and we broadcast those out onto NASA TV and Facebook Live. This includes launches and space walks. For the podcast, I was one of the co-creators of the Johnson Space Center podcast called Houston, We Have a Podcast. I’m the chief engineer and producer. I record it, edit it, mix it all together and our host is the one who posts it. For archiving we have a lot of old audio tapes from the Apollo missions and Gemini missions that still need to be archived. We’re talking thousands of hours of tape. I do some of that archiving as I have time and I do daily archiving of current digital content. 

In general, what kind of tools are you using for your broadcast work?
We have the audio control room, which we call the ACR, which is where I work and which has the console that I use. The Space Station sends their audio down to Earth through an encoder, which is a hybrid that allows them to send audio and video. They send their signal down to Mission Control, who sends it to our master control room on different channels. There are direct lines already built into the console. I take that audio and mix it together and send that to our satellite team in Atlanta and they put it out on NASA TV. So it’s a lot of bouncing around. 

The key word I’m taking from this is “encoder.” That’s how the signal actually gets to Mission Control? 
Well, it gets there that way if the audio is coming down with HD video. If they’re using handheld mics and talking to the media or education clients, we want super clean, high definition audio and video to match, so they send that through the encoders. Whenever they're just talking about day-to-day stuff with Mission Control, they talk on what we call voice loops. It’s like radio transmission. It’s [radio frequency] signals. Technically, the correct term is “space to ground loops” because the space audio is coming down to the ground and the ground audio is going back up to space. There’s not much delay but it sounds like you’re talking on walkie talkies. It’s similar to a phone call. And they’re talking to Mission Control all the time, so for that purpose it’s a simpler way to communicate. 

When you say “they,” you are referring to astronauts? 
Yes!

Ah. That’s so cool. Congratulations on your Emmy for the SpaceX Demo 1 mission!
Thank you!

What does that mission actually entail for an audio engineer? Can you break down what was actually happening?
So it was broken down into the launch, while they were at the Space Station, and the undocking, which is when you leave from the Space Station and head back down to Earth. This particular mission was a little different than others because we were working as a team of three different groups at the same time. We had Johnson Space Center — where I was at, Kennedy Space Center in Florida and SpaceX in Hawthorne, California. All of our teams were coordinated into one show. My position within that was to take in the audio coming from KSC and from SpaceX, mix it together and push it out on NASA TV, but we traded off who was in charge of the show. For certain parts of it, SpaceX and KSC were in control. We switched over once they arrived at the Space Station and I handled everything that was going on there. For example, when the president wanted to speak or when Elon Musk was talking, I’d handle that audio. I handled the audio of the undocking as well. 

Whoa. 
Yeah. That show was extremely complicated. 

But you don’t normally have that many players involved?
No! 

Well, again, congratulations on that success. You mentioned the audio control room. What does that space look like? What tools are you using there?
It’s really a candyland for audio people. There’s so much outboard gear. We have tons of compressors and a huge patch bay to connect different audio lines as needed. We have a Euphonix S5 console, which is a dinosaur, but that thing is amazing. I love working on it.

Are you using Pro Tools?
I do use Pro Tools on occasion but not so much for live events. The only way I really utilize it during live events is if we’re playing back audio that isn’t live. If someone did a call in or a voiceover, I’ll use it for playback. Other than that, it’s all live. 

You mentioned that you’re the engineer and editor but also the producer of the Johnson Space Center podcast. Podcasts often employ multiple people for these roles. What’s your work process like when you’re beginning a new episode?
We have a team of about five people. We have two people who handle the social side of it. They push it out into the world once it’s done. As a team, we come up with different topics we want to explore or people we want to interview, so it’s actually pretty open content-wise. If I meet somebody really cool, I can pitch that idea to the group. The host will reach out to them and set up a recording date. My job is then to make sure the microphones are set and the recorder we’re using is fine. We record it, then I edit the episode, mix it all together and add in the intro music and any relevant sound clips. I send that off to be reviewed by our leadership team. It’s government content so anything we put out has to be reviewed. Once that process is over, I usually receive tons of edits I need to make, then we push it to our social side to make sure we’re 501c3-compliant and we post it. Our turnaround time is usually somewhere around two weeks. We keep a buffer just in case it takes a while to receive the edits. 

But it is a weekly podcast?
Yeah. We record a ton of episodes in advance. 

I love that podcasting is an accessible medium and you don’t need a lot of equipment. Do you have any advice for someone who wants to get started podcasting? 
When we came up with the idea to start a podcast, we didn’t have any budget for it, so I had to use gear I already owned, which was basically two Heil PR 40 microphones and a Zoom recorder. The main thing for us was content. Strong content is the most important thing. Especially if you are brand new at this — if you aren’t used to mixing for podcasts, which is a little bit different than mixing music or audio for video, the audience will often give you something like a two-episode grace period based on the sound quality. Early on I learned that if I want consistency in how each episode sounds, it’s important to create a Pro Tools template. However I edited the first episode, I kept those plugins and settings saved on my template. I kept how long I needed the intro and outro music to be, too. This means that when I’m ready to start a new episode, I’m not starting from scratch. I can open up my saved template and work within the same settings as the previous episodes but with new audio. I have a solid, consistent starting point. That helped me so much. 

That’s a great suggestion. How exactly is recording and mixing for a podcast different from recording and mixing music or audio for video? 
So I found out that when you put something on iTunes versus SoundCloud or another platform, there are different standards and levels required for the audio. I had to find that sonic sweet spot or Apple Podcasts may decline your podcast or your listeners will complain because it sounds super compressed. This might be a result of you, the engineer, compressing your audio signal and then Apple compressing it more to meet their standards with not as much regard to the ultimate sonic quality of the podcast. That can be a battle. 

There are actual standards for audio levels in podcasts. I had to Google and research and learn this information when I got started because I didn’t know it was a thing. The same thing goes for mixing audio for television and radio. I encourage anyone wanting to create a podcast to get familiar with this stuff. Depending on the ultimate destination of your podcast, figure out what those mixing sweet spots are early on and how your work will be affected by the actions of whoever is hosting it. It will really make your work sound better if you are informed.

“Depending on the ultimate destination of your podcast, figure out what those mixing sweet spots are early on and how your work will be affected by the actions of whoever is hosting it. It will really make your work sound better if you are informed.”

Another thing to consider if you’re coming from a musical background is that you may have an inclination to make background music push through much louder than it needs to be. Podcasts are usually about people talking, though. You want the people talking to sit on top of the music and be the focal point, rather than mixing vocals into a background track where they might disappear. Find examples of really good-sounding podcasts and see if you can mimic their mix just by listening. 

What’s an example of a podcast that you think sounds really great?
I’m a huge fan of StarTalk even though we are technically competition. We’re both making podcasts about space. I love how crisp and clean their episodes sound. 

Earlier you mentioned archival work. I want to go deeper into that. 
When it comes to archiving, we have these reels of tapes that have been sitting in storage since they were first recorded decades ago. No one else has ever heard them and it’s our job to digitize this audio. Sometimes I have to bake the reels of tape in an oven for a week or so. Usually then you can get one or two good passes of running through it to pull good audio off of it. We have to handle all of this material really carefully because we do risk pieces of tape breaking off. If that happens, there’s not much to do about it. It’s historical audio so if something goes wrong, it cannot be recreated. Once the audio is digitized, we send it to the National Archives in Washington, D.C. and it goes online for the public to hear.

And when you say you bake the reels of tape in an oven, that’s not hyperbole. What’s the benefit of doing this? 
Correct. You are literally putting it in an oven. If reels of tape are stored improperly, whether it’s the conditions of the room they’re in or how the tape is stored on the reel itself, after a while it will become extremely hard to extract audio during the digitization process. The moment you press play to get the reel to spin, it’s likely to break. When you put it in the oven and bake it, it makes the tape easier to move around the reel and for the audio to be pulled off. It’s not a long-term solution but we aren’t repeatedly using these reels. Once the audio has been digitized, we are finished with them. 

We also do daily archiving of what we call “space to grounds,” which is Space Station communicating with Mission Control. This is really for two reasons. One reason we do this is so the public can hear it. Another is in the event that there’s an issue on the Space Station. If it was fixed in real time and that process and solution are recorded, if and when the same issue arises a year or two years later, whoever is working can go back and revisit this audio as reference and hear the steps that were taken. It’s really helpful for them. 

Are you from Houston originally?
Yes! 

I love Houston. I have been through on tour several times and it’s a great music city.
Me too. There are a lot of important artists from here and a lot of great venues. 

Did you have formal training in audio or are you self-taught?
Growing up I was in the marching band. I played saxophone. Right before my senior year, I injured my ankle and couldn’t march that season. My band director told me that summer, Hey, why don’t you try being the sound tech for the front ensemble? I started hooking up a few microphones and plugging them into a small portable mixer that was powered by a generator. He handed me a manual and told me to learn what all the knobs and faders did. When I mixed sound at our first competition, I felt such a rush. I felt so powerful but also focused because if I made a mistake, everyone would be able to hear it. It was awesome. 

I love that. Shout out to your band director. He changed the course of your life!
Totally. Later on I went to Full Sail University and studied audio more formally.

What are your biggest goals for yourself, within and beyond NASA?
Within NASA one of my biggest goals is, whenever we go back to the moon, to be able to mix the first show of people talking on the moon. Just knowing I’m mixing audio coming from the moon would be awesome.

That is more than awesome. I just got chills. 
Right? It’s so cool to think about. Outside of NASA I want to be able to mix other big shows like the Grammys or an audio broadcast for the Oscars. 

What advice would you give to someone who is just getting started in audio? 
Allow yourself to make mistakes. You will make mistakes, especially in live audio. Don’t beat yourself up. You know how it is — if you’re working with live sound and you make a mistake and dwell on it, it’s very quickly going to turn into a chain reaction of mistakes. Allow yourself to grow and to learn and to understand that great audio engineers didn’t learn their trade overnight. It probably took a lot of failures to get to where they are.
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Listen to Alex on her recent episode of Signal to Noise podcast and keep up with her on Instagram.