NPR Announces Passing of Audio Engineer Renee Pringle
Just one of the network’s to start with Black female audio engineers, Pringle spent additional than 4 decades at NPR
NPR has misplaced a longtime audio engineer and sector veteran. Renee Pringle, who commenced at NPR in 1979 at a time when there were being couple of women performing professionally in audio, died soon after suffering from a selection of wellbeing difficulties in modern months. She was 69.
Pringle was viewed as a pioneer in her area, having combined an incalculable selection of industry interviews, tunes performances and NPR programs that took her across the country, overseas and into the halls of govt.
Though NPR listeners wouldn’t have listened to her speaking about the radio, they would have “heard her voice as a result of all the sounds of humanity she introduced to listeners for more than 40 decades,” wrote NPR correspondent Hansi Lo Wang in a social media put up.
“Renee joined NPR in an era when our engineers carried bulky, 20-pound recorders in the subject and everything was recorded on reel-to-reel tape,” explained Chris Nelson, NPR’s senior vice president of technology operations.
Pringle also served as the technological director for the Peabody Award-successful “Wade in the Water” documentary, a sequence about gospel new music that NPR developed with the Smithsonian Establishment in 1994. Throughout a panel about the documentary in 2019, Pringle explained that her favorite recording from the series was a particularly tranquil efficiency of “Listen to the Lambs” specified by the Howard University Chamber Choir in which she had to really encourage complete stillness from the audience to decide on up the nuances of the singers.
“I would just go ridiculous if I heard anyone swallow,” she reported. “If I heard them blink their eyes, I would hear it. And I’d say, ‘Who did that?’ They experienced to do it around. And luckily, everyone was so cooperative.”
NPR colleagues and enthusiasts had related recollections when thinking of Pringle’s kindness, generosity and awareness of the audio engineering world.
“She [gave] me the area recording bug,” reported Fred Greenhalgh of the time he achieved Pringle through the Nationwide Audio Theatre Festivals’ 2007 meeting. Greenhalgh is a new winner of a 2022 countrywide award for excellence in audio theater.
“Renee had a musical ear — she could genuinely make a piece sing,” wrote Tom Cole, a senior arts editor who retired after more than a few many years at NPR in a remembrance. “She didn’t use as well a great deal EQ — she needed the humanity in the voices to occur by means of.”
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