VK Icons: John Storyk

What do Electric Lady Studios, Rue Boyer – Mix With The Masters, Jazz At Lincoln Centre, Flughafenkopf – Zurich Airport, Maracanã Stadium, Berlin Hauptbahnhof – Central Station, Spotify At Mateo, Jungle City Studios, and the National Museum of Qatar have in common? These are just some of the spaces that have been acoustically designed and perfected by WSDG (Walters-Storyk Design Group), co-founded by architect/acoustician John Storyk, over an illustrious 55-year career. 

We recently had the privilege of sitting down with John for an engaging conversation about his life’s work. He was full of energy, happy to acknowledge his achievements, but very interested in looking to a future filled with innovation, design, and sonic problem-solving. 

Read on to find out more about his first big breakthrough, his thoughts on AI, the ethos of WSDG, and the common thread that runs through all the projects he’s worked on.

You started out designing Electric Lady Studios for Jimi Hendrix, and now you’re at the forefront of AI-powered audio optimization with REDIacoustics – that’s an incredible and diverse career trajectory. Where should we start? 

People often ask me similar questions all the time, starting from “What was Jimi like?” which I don't mind, mainly because each year there are less people living that actually knew him or were in the same room with him.

And then they'll say, “What's your favorite studio?”, which I hate answering because my standard answer is, “Usually the one I'm working on,” because at that given moment, that is my favorite studio! 

Collectively, in all of our offices at any one time, we have over 100 projects and they're not all studios, but as far as studios are concerned, I love them. That's where I started and I suppose that's where I'll finish. It's a perfect opportunity for me to continue to fall in love with architecture, music, and engineering.

As for AI, it has been here for a long time; what hasn't been here for a long time is the publicity around it. Lots of us have been using tools that would fall in the domain of AI: if you’ve used a cellphone for the last five years, without even realizing it you're using AI text prompting. What do you think Google is? What do you think most of Silicon Valley is?

In the last few months, it has gotten a lot of publicity, mainly because of some very big investments and one piece of AI – these large language learning models – which provide the ability to throw a few words in and get lots of words back really quick. All of a sudden, millions of people can use it easily, so everybody wakes up. But we've been using it for a while. We're artists and we're engineers – what better place to be right now!

My entire career, and basically the WSDG culture, combines music, art, and engineering (the engineering being acoustics). As my good friend, partner at WSDG, and COO, Josh Morris, would like to say, we're really, really lucky because we're at a perfect nexus of these three disciplines.

When you're an artist, you're working with feelings, emotion, intuition. When you're an engineer, you sometimes put that aside and go for much more empirical kinds of activities. You engage in multiple processes that like to go from A to B to C to D and have conclusions that are repeatable and irrefutable; that's the nature of engineering. But when you combine the two of them, I feel we have something really, really exciting. 

So with AI, in the case of REDIacoustics, it allows us to get literally hundreds of potential frequency responses in five minutes, and then – after we put in some taste and standards boundaries – it can quickly, using a genetic algorithm to sort through them, give us a list of the best ones. 

The fact that we can do that during lunch instead of spending a week on it is amazing! But it's not magic, it's just magical. It's just data; it's just spitting out lots of information that’s organized very, very quickly. In my humble opinion, it still takes a person to ingest that information and decide whether it's useful. 

When using an AI tool, or any tool for that matter – take something as simple as a hammer… Anybody can go to Home Depot and buy a hammer, but that doesn't mean you're a carpenter. It just means you own a hammer. You could kill yourself with the hammer or lose a finger if you don't know what you're doing.

On the other hand, you could take a 16-ounce framing hammer and build a beautiful cocktail table, but you need to bring a person into that mix. So as I said, we constantly remind ourselves that we're at the nexus of these core dynamics – art, music, engineering, architecture, and acoustics. It's very exciting.  

Rue Boyer, the Mix With The Masters studio in Paris that you designed, recently won the Studio Design Project award at the 2024 NAMM TEC Awards. Tell us about that project.

Rue Boyer was an almost perfect confluence of art, music, engineering, and a few more things. First of all, it was in Paris. What's so bad about being able to go to Paris?! I got to do that a few times on that project, and also we hadn't really done any studios in Paris until then, so that in itself was exciting.

Working with Mix With The Masters was a joy – they are one of the premier online video educational groups; one of the biggest and best in the world, so it was an honor to get the project.

It was an existing space that we inherited. I don't know that history because I wasn't there, but another designer started it, got some of the way into the design, and the owners Max Le Guil and Victor Levy-Lasne realized that the direction that person was going in was not right and he was not able to finish the job.

So we inherited some of the basic shapes of the rooms, got to change some of them, and got to completely redo the interior materialization for which we used our NIRO (Non-Cuboid Iterative Room Optimizer) software to help us. 

The biggest room is Studio A, which is the control room, but from time to time they need to put maybe ten or twelve musicians in there – what you and I would call a live room. So how do you do that? Well, the only way they could do that was to get the vintage SSL console to go down via a lift into the basement and cover it.  

So they had this idea for a pit and we had to figure out how to make it work and we had an ‘aha moment’. Generally speaking, often one of the best places in a room to put low-frequency absorption is above or below the listener; we’ve known this for a while and this is one of the reasons you often see a ceiling cloud in a control room.

A terrific place for low-frequency absorption would be below the console but usually, you have a console, a chair, and a floor, so you don't get a chance to do it. But at Rue Boyer, we had this giant hole under the console – the floor is actually perforated and it became a low-frequency resonator – so it was a huge opportunity for us to introduce the required low-frequency absorption. That was a nice perk – what initially looked like a liability became an asset.

From the very beginning, Victor and Max wanted an old-school/new-school approach. They wanted a modern contemporary studio that had to fit in a very challenging space that was the home for almost any kind of small-format rock and roll music recording. It also had to work as a backdrop for their videos because that's really their core business. So it had to look forward technically, but they also wanted to look back emotionally – all the way back to the 60s and 70s.

In the end, that was the challenge – constantly battling between making it look extremely contemporary and then also making it look extremely retro. But it was very comfortable for us, and it was particularly comfortable for me because, as you know, my start is well-documented. It's an easy story to read about and although I don’t dwell on it often, I don't mind if you want to review it. 

Absolutely! Take us back to when you got your start with Electric Lady Studios.

I wouldn't call it an accident because I don't really believe in accidents – my favorite word really is ‘serendipity’ – but imagine being 22, arriving in New York City in the late 60s, which was a very exciting time, and because of an unusual set of events that almost were accidental in nature, you get a commission to do a club which becomes famous overnight.

Then Jimi Hendrix goes to the club and decides to buy a blues club that ironically I used to go to when I was in a blues band (sax and piano), and says, “Find the guy that did that downtown club, because that's the vibe that I want”. The next thing you know, you're getting a call from Jimi Hendrix's management office to design a club for him! 

Then at the last minute, the club gets scrapped and it becomes a studio because Jimi’s producer/engineer Eddie Kramer reminds Jimi that he doesn't need a club – what he needs is a studio. Of course, I'm very upset because I don't really know anything about studios but they don't fire me. They say, “Well, why don't you just stay on and try to design the studio?”

The next thing you know, I'm designing a recording studio and I have never even been in a recording studio! Imagine that set of events, and I’ll let you figure out whether that’s an accident, meant to be, or serendipitous. But then you have to throw away serendipity and you have to introduce carpe diem. That's about the only Latin I know, but you have to seize the moment. 

So I basically quit my day job in an architecture office; I walked in and said, “I got a commission!” They couldn't even figure out how I got it. I said, “I just can't do this anymore. I have to devote myself to this full time and I've got to tour every studio that I could, read everything I could.”

With a lot of help from Eddie Kramer, Phil Ramone, and some other people who were involved, we kind of got to the other side of the studio design. Some of it was left over from the club design, some of it I believe I picked up very quickly, and some of it was just a little bit of good luck.

I was very fortunate to have a pretty good jump on a career. I mean, before the studio was built, I had three other studios to design. It was not a particularly large studio design community, in fact, there was virtually no studio design community. But I didn't know that – I was 22 years old, and well, you don't know anything when you're 22. You think you do, but you don’t really. 

It was, I guess, a fortunate beginning, but, you know, lots of people have fortunate beginnings. Everybody has serendipitous career moments; it's just a question of whether you seize them. 

What makes Electric Lady Studios iconic to this day?

It was many years later, maybe 25 years later, that I finally got to measure the room acoustically – in the 70s I didn't even have the equipment to do it! And I thought, “Why does this room work?” It can't just be because of Jimi Hendrix – first of all, he was in there for a few months; and Jimi's vibe in the walls…if you want to believe that, that's fine, but there's got to be some other reasons why the iconic live Studio A room works. Well, it turns out there are.

One of the main characteristics of the room is its extraordinary low-frequency response – the low-frequency reverb time does not rise and get out of control. In fact, it even falls off a little bit, which is often not the case for studios; you have to work really hard to make that happen.

This ceiling that I had made was a flat, propeller-shaped ceiling out of air-perforated plaster, which I sort of intuitively thought would be semi-absorptive, and at the time, I didn't realize that we were making a giant membrane absorber, which now, of course, we do all the time.

Now we know a lot more about how they behave and we can calculate them and predict them. But what I didn't realize is that's what we were making and that's why the room works, technically. You know, it's not the river that runs under the studio – there's really not a river, more like a water table; there is water under the studio, that's for sure, but this is not why the studio sounds good. 

To me, that's the way studios are supposed to be: they're supposed to be technically correct and all about emotion, lighting, and vibe. It never occurred to me that they were meant to be any other way, so I was very fortunate that way to have that beginning. Some of it was just about being at the right place and the right time, and that's okay if you learn from it and if you're humble about it.  

How did you go about navigating your career after that?

It's grown completely organically, which, in retrospect, is exactly what was supposed to happen. 

I was a sole practitioner for a while, and when I got busy, I hired one or two drafting people to help me, and then things grew a little bit more where I needed a secretary and a sort of office manager. And then another one of those moments happened – I met Beth Walters, 36 years ago, and we fell in love.

I'd already been through a few marriages and had some kids; she arrived with a four-month-old son and within a matter of six months, we were partners in everything. The time was just right in my life for that to happen. There's that ‘serendipity’ word again!

She's a textile designer and an interior designer by trade, and I realized that she'd be a good partner for me for interior design, which is not my forte; I'm not really a color person, I think geometrically. So I took my career and together we pushed it into a new entity called Walters-Storyk Design Group, and then, of course, we got married, had another son, moved to the country, and the rest is history. We became partners, had a few employees, and then one thing led to another. 

Then each year, I got smarter, affiliates arrived in my life, students became interns, interns became representatives and partners, a company was developed, and now it's 60 people worldwide. Dirk Noy, Partner/Director of Applied Science and Engineering, was a student who then became an intern and now heads both of our Europe offices.

Sergio Molho, Partner/Director of Business Development, was someone I met at a conference in Buenos Aires. I needed some speakers so he went to his personal studio, took his speakers and gave them to me for a booth display, and then ended up translating my talk. I said, “I'll design your studio for free if you represent me in Argentina.” The next thing you know, we formed a company. 

We at WSDG have a very specific culture. Everybody's on a slightly different schedule; we're in multiple time zones. Everybody works at home on Fridays, which started as a result of COVID. It's like a family; nobody works with us that doesn't want to. Now we have a whole program where if you work for three years for us, you get 1% of the company as a gift. It's our own version of an owner-owned profile, done in our own way. 

All of this business and management energy is exciting, but it wasn't like I woke up one day and said, “Let's have a global organization.” That's not it at all; I didn't have any plan for doing that.

I'm a piano player, a sax player, an architect, and a musician; I have no formal business experience at all, so it's been kind of fun to watch it evolve. I'm sort of the elder statesman of the company, the founding partner, responsible for the livelihood of almost 60 people and their families. It's very touching, and it's very emotional…and then I go back to work. 

You’ve designed a large variety of spaces – what is the common thread that runs through them?

I think the common thread is that we tend to not get involved in a project if we don't think it's capable of being award-winning and inspiring. Now, every project can’t be published and not every project can win a TEC award, but we believe we would like a client and a project and our effort to parallel that desire so we can give it our proper attention. 

We will not take projects where we cannot be involved in the supervision of construction. We've seen too many projects not get executed correctly. A studio project is only as good as its execution, and for every project, the client has to not only be respectful of the design process, but at least want to have some sense of vibe and some sense of personality, as well as all the other design elements – acoustics, the isolation, the air conditioning works, and so forth.

Of course, we're going to get that right! But in order to get the vibe, in order to get that essence – which goes all the way back to my first project 55 years ago – you need a client that believes in that. We’re very fortunate because what's happened over the years is that people who align themselves with that concept call us. We seem to get the right calls from the right people and the inverse is we don't get calls from people who are not interested in that, and that's okay.  

Remember, when someone calls up and we start a project – for example, a typical mid-size studio project – it's kind of like getting married to that person for a year; some projects take two years. So I'm sometimes chatting with the client, and maybe in the first 30 minutes of the call, I'll sometimes just stop and say “Are you going to be nice?” [Laughs] And they'll say, “Why are you asking? I don't understand the question.” I’ll say, “Well, it's not a trick question.”

It seems like a very simple question and I explain to them, “We're about to get married for a year; that's what's going to happen here.” During our marriage, we're going to have issues of differences in taste, and schedules; we're going to have money and budget issues, all kinds of issues and we're going to have to agree that we have to be respectful of each other because it's not easy to do this at this level. So we long for the perfect client and when this happens it's magical.

Once again, I'm a really blessed, lucky person because I had an amazing client at the start. Jimi was an incredible client; I met him four or five times. I ended up working mostly with Eddie Kramer who was the day-to-day contact, and Eddie became a lifetime friend. I just spoke to him three days ago.

He lives in Canada now and he's my daughter's godfather. He was a mentor of mine, an artist, and a producer himself, so he understood producing, and that there can be issues and delays, and I was very fortunate that way – that's a common thread. Falling in love with the design process is a special kind of love affair.

There is a strong educational component to your practice – tell us more about how that came about.

I've always enjoyed teaching; I came from a family where my parents stressed education. They provided the resources for me to go to a really good school that was steeped in a Socratic method of teaching – small classes, almost one-on-one with professors. I left university really believing that teachers teach students and then the students end up teaching the teachers. 

People often ask me, “Well, what did you learn at Princeton in four years?” I learned how to speak and I learned how to fall in love with learning, so it wasn't hard for me to also end up being a teacher, in the form of guest lecturing on studio design and acoustics. I love it!

I'm comfortable doing it, I enjoy it, and of course, I get to meet really, really cool students. A lot of those students have become interns, and then some of the interns have become my partners, and now they're teaching me – exactly what's supposed to happen has happened. 

Now I'm in the sort of winter of my career; I'm 78, and I'm still working, but I've got a lot of partners who are in the summer of their careers. We have a few other people at WSDG who give lectures, we give talks to architects, and we enjoy that. It's fun to see somebody at the end of an hour be smarter about this subject that we're passionate about.

What has your experience with Vintage King been like?

Vintage King is clearly one of the leaders in the distribution of pro and even semi-pro audio equipment, and I know this because that's where a lot of my clients buy their equipment. So we see Vintage King on a lot of our projects, and then from time to time, Vintage King refers us.

I would love Vintage King to refer us more, but it's not a requirement. [Laughs] We're very fond of Vintage King and we at WSDG support their efforts in the pro audio ecosystem.

What’s in store for the future?

I'm still working. I don't have to work anymore; I've done as much as you need to do. Beth and I have transferred ownership of over half of our company to the younger affiliates who are now owners and partners. I still like designing and I still like learning; that's what I was doing at five this morning.

When you and I leave each other, I'm going to have lunch and then I'm going back to work on one of our projects. Right now I'm working on an interesting production facility in Australia; we have a nice building in the Caribbean that we’re in preliminary design on; another studio in Philadelphia, and one in China. I

've got about four or five projects that I'm involved in right now so I'm thinking about them, sketching, having meetings with my team, etc. and that's still very exciting for me. We were wrestling with a door yesterday; I couldn't get it in the right place. These are the things that I'm involved with and I enjoy it.  

Then there’s REDIacoustics, which really started out as a research division of WSDG and when it got a bit too large to manage we said, “Let's form a separate company so we can kind of get the finances of that out of WSDG.” That's just a business thing, but we are still doing the research. Having taken us a few years, we now have the software, but there's no front end on it; it's a bit messy, you’ve got to know Python in order to use it.

People are currently requesting to purchase our software, but it’s not up for sale yet. We're in the process of creating a very simple geometric modeling predictive version – think of it as phase one of a full NIRO report – and we're thinking of putting a front end on it and maybe offering that for sale. This version could easily provide you with the best position for speakers and a critical listening position.

That information alone would be incredible; there could be thousands of people who would find this information helpful. They don't need a full WSDG design package. Who knows, maybe in the not-so-distant future, Vintage King could represent this software for us. Who knows where serendipity will take us?

If you’re interested in building your own custom studio, contact a Vintage King Audio Consultant via email or by phone at 866.644.0160.