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At Eighth Day Sound, Zoe Mumford learned how to make concerts and festivals sing — from hanging speaker systems to properly storing cables. Following graduation, the music technology major will tour full time.
When talking about her co-op at a major sound design company for live music, Zoe Mumford knows to address the elephant in the room.
“Yes, they did the Eras tour,” the third-year Northeastern University music technology student says. She’s talking about Eighth Day Sound, the Cleveland-based firm that creates and deploys the sound systems for the biggest tickets in the music industry, from Beyoncé to Bonnaroo.
Mumford did not work on the Eras tour. But on co-op in Eighth Day’s Ohio warehouse during the 2024 spring semester, she did help build sound systems for a bevy of major acts that went on the road this past summer.
“We provide everything except for the instruments,” she says. “All of the speakers, the control connections, the mixing consoles and everything that goes along with that.”
Some of the stars for whom she worked on tour packages included Olivia Rodrigo, Blink 182, Green Day, Fred Again and Noah Kahan.
“There was a big buzz in the shop for Noah Kahan,” she says. Fred Again, an English songwriter, DJ and producer who exploded in popularity in 2023, had the craziest audio system she witnessed being put together, though. “It was absolute insanity in the warehouse when that one went out,” Mumford remembers. “He got very big overnight and wanted this massive order with two semi-trucks full of just speakers. But it was great.”
Mumford grew up in a musical family in Grafton, Massachusetts; she played flute and guitar in high school. The first stage show she was ever involved in was a high school production of the musical “Mama Mia,” as a member of the pit orchestra.
But a non-musical show — a mystery farce called “13 Past Midnight” — sent her down her backstage career path.
“We would do a spring musical and a fall play at school, and the fall play didn’t have an orchestra pit,” Mumford recounts. “I didn’t feel like joining the cast, so I asked if I could do audio. And something clicked. It was really rewarding, and I thought, ‘I could keep doing this for a long time.’”
In her Northeastern classes, Mumford learned tech basics: how speakers make sound, principles like signal flow and cycle acoustics. But she quickly intuited that she would have to learn most of what she needed by actually getting her hands dirty. She learned of the Eighth Day co-op through Nancy Tarr, her adviser in the College of Arts, Media and Design (CAMD).
“Another student had done this live audio co-op and had been able to go on tour. And I was like, ‘that sounds sick,’” she says. “That was always this big pipe dream: to go out on the road and see the world. “Just travel and make concerts happen.”
Her first day in the Cleveland warehouse, she was put right to work loading up equipment for an outgoing tour.
As a co-op, Mumford got to cycle around the vast facility’s different departments, each representing a puzzle piece of a touring sound package. “Each department focuses on different aspects of the larger system,” she says. “There’s a cables department; that’s really important. There is a department for the speakers, a department for the consoles.”
She’d spend days at a time cutting cables or organizing gear. At some point, she made her way back to the Design and Repair (D&R) shop, where she learned to solder and build component parts for speakers. Ideally, it’s the sort of work that never gets noticed.
“We hope that you’re not thinking about the sound of the show,” Mumford says. “We’re the players behind the scenes making sure you can just enjoy the concert.”
Toward the end of her co-op, Mumford was asked to come back for the summer as part of Eighth Day’s professional roadie training program — required to go on the road as a full-time employee. The 12-week course schooled her in scenarios she would encounter on the road — hanging a speaker system in the rafters of an arena, loading up an equipment truck in a complicated game of Tetris. The safety training, too, was intense — from how to distribute weight evenly across heavy equipment systems to what PPE to wear (steel-toed boots, helmets).
“Honestly the loading in and loading out, and the placing all your gear in a well-organized fashion was the hardest,” she says.
Mumford is back on campus for the fall and spring semesters, but when classes get out in May, she’ll spend a few weeks brushing up in Cleveland before being sent out on the road. She’d love to work on a heavy alt rock tour for a group like Slipknot.
“I’m not necessarily the strongest live performer as a musician, but I still really wanted to participate in this industry,” she says. “This is kind of the perfect marriage for me of something artistic and a little more tech-oriented, a little more quantitative.”