Faculty Member Presents at Abbey Road Studios

Kikta, who serves as the Chair of Commercial Music and Media; Associate Professor of Music Technology; Guitar Area Coordinator; and Director of the Institute of Entertainment, Music, and Media Arts for the Mary Pappert School of Music (MPSOM), is also a current panel member of the Audio Educators Advisory Group. This group, which is directed by John Krivit (past President of the Audio Engineering Society), works directly with big-name audio industry organizations including the Les Paul Foundation, Eventide Audio, Telefunken Microphone, Audiomovers, and Abbey Road Studios, to name a few.

Audiomovers recently released a new version of their product—Listento—which enables real-time feedback and collaboration between recording studios and clients via direct web connections. Studios can use the software to share and play back up to 128 channels of lossless audio to clients or other stakeholders around the world, allowing for instant feedback and adjustment.

Prior to the public release of the new version of Listento, Audiomovers provided copies of the software to the Audio Educators Advisory Group members for beta testing and user feedback. They also sought insight and creative applications of the product from these industry professionals.

It didn’t take long for Kikta to realize the incredible potential of Listento and set to work developing a workflow that would enable nearly synchronous live soundstage recording sessions with artists located in various studios around the world.

In July 2025, he gathered student and alumni musicians from the Mary Pappert School of Music, along with faculty colleague and Hollywood composer Michael Andreas and Warner Brothers artist Jeff Bergman (the official voice of Bugs Bunny and other Looney Tunes characters) to prove his concept.

Andreas and Bergman set up in their respective studios in Hollywood, while the orchestra, conducted by alumnus and current faculty member Alex Price, were based in the recording studios here at the MPSOM. Using Listento bidirectionally, Kikta was able to pull off a recording session where the orchestra played a score for a Looney Tunes scene composed by Andreas. That live feed was broadcast 2,422 miles across the country to Bergman and Andreas. Bergman was then able to interject the dialogue as various characters in near-real time. He then broadcast his feed back to the studio here in Pittsburgh, again using Listento. With very little post-production work, the audio engineer here at Duquesne was able to hear a final mix of the “scene.”

The session brought faculty and industry professionals together to work side-by-side (virtually) with an chamber orchestra of 11 current students and recent alumni, as well as 4 student and alumni production engineers.

Lucas Orsatti (sophomore, B.M. Music Technology) was a video engineer for the project, documenting the production’s technical aspects. After the session wrapped, he edited together footage from the session, Zoom video from Andreas and Bergman, and an interview with Kikta, along with the final video of the fully-produced recording. A behind-the-scenes portion of that video is available on the Mary Pappert School of Music YouTube channel.

“When Prof. Kikta called me over the summer asking if I’d be available to film a video,” said Orsatti, “all he had to say were the words “Abbey Road” and I was instantly on board. And because I was there and helping out, I just happened to pick up how Listento works, or how to chain the MyMix and Aviom headphone solutions together, or how to set up the controllable cameras the right way, or a million other things that have built on the base ideas we go over in the classroom. Working on this project has helped me realize how important it is to just be reliable and open to literally anything, especially in the music industry.”

Kikta demonstrated his innovative use of Listento on August 22 in Studio 3 at Abbey Road Studios (the same room in which the Beatles recorded Revolver and Pink Floyd recorded Dark Side of the Moon). He had the honor of being the final presenter, where he shared his experience and showed Orsatti’s video (which elicited the same notes of humor and laughter that one would expect from any Looney Tunes video) to a highly-receptive audience.

Moving forward, Listento has solidified itself in Kikta’s audio curricula and will be a “go-to” tool for collaboration in both his classroom and professional recording business ventures. In addition, MPSOM students are able to access Listento—among other software and hardware options—at a discounted rate.