December 18, 2025
Last month, the MIT Ohms hosted our semesterly end-of-semester concert. Much like every other semester, we performed our entire set, comprising twelve original arrangements (as well as one original composition). The theme for our concert was "Spider-Man: Hohmcoming," so our two script writers wrote an original story featuring Spider-Man (as an MIT student) and a cast of adversaries and villains. Our music was interwoven into the script, and we alternated, sort of like a musical, between performing scenes (starring the "micro-ohms"--our freshmen--in the lead roles) and singing our music.
Unlike most semesters, this one marked the group's fifteen year anniversary. In the spirit of "go big or go home," we decided to host the show in Kresge Auditorium, something the Ohms had never done before.
I was the treasurer for the fall semester, and I'm the de facto logistician for the group given my affinity for event planning, so I was in charge of most of the logistical coordination for the event. I thought it would be fun and worthwhile to go through the past few months and see how this concert came to be.
Core efforts to actually execute this concert include an entire semester of musical leadership by our musical directors, Shruti and Mary, to get our music concert-ready; an entire semester of work by our president, Apurva, to line up guest performers for our concert and coordinate all board work (and do all remaining tasks herself); an intense final publicity thrust spurred by Roshni and executed by the entire group that resulted in a wonderful turnout for our group in the biggest venue on campus; and perhaps most critically, a ton of work by alohms and friends of the group, who handled a ton of day-of logistics including coordinating food delivery and managing visiting groups. There's too much to say about all the work that goes into running an organization like the Ohms and hosting a large event like this, but in the rest of this post I can only focus on the things with which I was directly involved, so I want to thank them all here at the top!
At some point in spring 2025, I mentioned in passing that fall 2025 would be the group's 15th anniversary and that it would be nice to do something celebratory. In 2021, when everything went online due to COVID, some of the Ohms arranged "Ohms Over The Years," a medley of some of the group's greatest hits over the years. Apurva had the idea to modernize and update it for a hypothetical fifteenth anniversary concert.
Apurva: @alohms I am going to be refactoring ohms over the years to potentially be a whole group arrangement next sem. If there are songs from 2021-2025 that you believe are iconic and should be included let me know
Nithya: Thinking of ohms over the years
Apurva: We might be bringing it back at this winter concert 👀
Apurva: Currently in development
The semester started as normal. By the second week of classes, aca-exec (the collective of campus a cappella group executive boards) sent out a poll for groups to submit their preferred concert and dress rehearsal times, in order to coordinate concert scheduling and room reservations for 10-250 (the classroom where most groups typically hold their semester concerts). Most groups typically have their concerts during the last couple weekends of the semester. We have followed the coordinated scheduling procedure for the last couple semesters, although looking through the Ohms YouTube channel it seems like our group also had had its share of pre-Thanksgiving fall concerts in the past.
Based on the tentative rehearsal schedule, Apurva suggested moving up the concert, and as I was scrolling through Mazevo (MIT's space reservation management system) I saw that Kresge was available in late November.
Apurva: Can we do 11/23 concert 😈
Apurva: The weekend before thanksgiving ðŸ˜
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Apurva: We’d be done learning all arrs by then anyway
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Om: we can get main Kresge on the 23rd
In early September, I made the initial Kresge booking for Sunday, November 23rd. After some subsequent internal discussions, we realized it would be hard to pull off a Sunday concert, since we had invited a group from UMass to perform, we had several alohms traveling from out of town, and we had plans for a post-concert dinner and after-pohmty, and we didn't want to be constrained by the timing of a school night. So a couple weeks later I updated our booking to Saturday, November 22nd, our ultimate concert date.
Kresge has over a thousand seats, so we wanted to do a thoughtful job publicizing the concert so we wouldn't be performing to an empty auditorium.
Apurva: @hohmies we’re doing concert in Kresge this year so we are gonna lock in on pub and every Tuesday after rehearsal, we will be filming content for our socials!!!! Pub is all semester long so make sure you tell your friends/aquaintances you’re in the ohms so that they’ll want to pull up to our concert
Some ideas for publicity included free food and chai, and we thought this would be a nice cultural touch to our concert as well.
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Roshni: If we’re trying to fill up main Kresge we should probably start now
Roshni: Ideas for filling up Kresge:
Roshni: Serve free food easy to make (chai? lassi? some samosas?)
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Kresge Auditorium is unique in that the PA system is above the clouds above the stage, so it's necessary to supplement the sound system with floor fills to get full sound coverage of the auditorium for a music event. You can either hire MIT AV to operate the Kresge PA system, and then they will set up floor fills and run sound for the event, or you can hire an external sound company to run sound, and then they have to bring in a full rig (and they can't access the house audio system). We collected quotes from a few different local live sound companies and ultimately chose Wellspring Sound to set up and run an external sound system. Kresge is also equipped with a full LED lighting system. We hired E33, MIT's student lighting production group, to run the lighting booth.
We managed to snag a space reservation in Kresge for 11/14 (the Friday one week before our concert) so that we could run our dress rehearsal on stage. We rehearsed from 5-7, broke for team dinner at New Vassar dining hall, and then returned to run our full show from start to finish. It was a tiring dress rehearsal after a long week, but near the end we could feel everything clicking. I went into the weekend very excited about the concert.
The final few days before the concert were quite an adventure and had me running all around town and campus as I learned new things about how to run a large event!
During the final week of the concert, I started to remember things we would need to pull off the non-musical parts of the concert. For example, on Thursday evening, I realized we needed lots of plates and cups and napkins to serve samosas and chai to our guests. Unfortunately, Target.com said these were out of stock at the Target in Central Square, so I left work at 9:30pm and biked as fast as I could to the Target in Somerville. Luckily I was able to get enough plates and cups and napkins there.
Historically, we've recorded and live streamed our concert from a tablet or phone, or we've paid our photographer to handle this for us. I wanted to figure out how to record and livestream from a camcorder, as I figured it would be a bit higher quality. I also wanted to build skills and learn something that would be useful for iQuHACK 2026 and Boston Bandish 2026, two other events in early 2026 that I'm helping to organize. I learned that the MIT Filmmakers' Association offered videography equipment to MIT students, so on Friday afternoon I stopped by their club office to see what they had. They had one camcorder and a few spare batteries, so I took those to my office.
On Friday night, after work, I started to explore how to set up the live stream. Having heard of OBS before, I downloaded and installed it and started to configure it. I then learned that we would need a USB capture card to access the camera's video output from my computer. I also realized that we would need an SD card to record the video from the camera, and I also remembered that the sound company had asked us to provide a hard drive so they could record our stems. So I made a second consecutive 9:30pm bike ride to the Target in Somerville and concurrently placed an Instacart order for the capture card, to be delivered the next morning. (It arrived on time and worked perfectly.)
Just before 2pm, the scheduled concert start time, I realized that the camera we had borrowed from the MIT Filmmakers' Club had a defective battery, and none of the replacement batteries I had borrowed from them were working, and they didn't have a battery charger. Luckily, the sound company had a spare camera that they let me use. Unluckily, its video output was a standard-sized HDMI port, and the treasure trove of cables in my backpack did not include a sufficiently long HDMI cable. At this point, I ran as fast as I could to my office in Building 13 and began searching for an HDMI cable. No luck for the first three places I looked: everyone uses DisplayPort for their monitors. Finally, I ran into Junyoung, one of the senior graduate students in my research group, who pointed me to a drawer in which an HDMI cable was sitting right at the top. I thanked him and sprinted back to Kresge.
With the HDMI cable in hand, I plugged the capture card in my laptop and connected it to the camera. Heidi helped configure the OBS stream on my laptop and started the stream, and it worked perfectly.
On account of our 2pm concert time, we had a call time of 9am on Saturday morning. I think everyone mostly showed up on time. We ran through our music while the sound company set up the audio system. Once the audio system was ready to go, we ran through each arrangement and made sure that the sound company had all of our sound cues.
Our sound check ran a bit late, and we then transitioned to sound checks for the three invited groups: MIT Nritya (MIT's Indian classical dance group), NU Sanskriti (Northeastern's graduate Indian fusion music group) and UMass Rang (UMass' South Asian fusion a cappella group). We had fed the external groups at the MIT dining halls as we ran our sound check.
There were two big logistical challenges during sound check, both related to NU Sanskriti's large instrumental setup with drums, guitars, and an electric keyboard. First, there was a bit of miscommunication with NU Sanskriti regarding equipment needs, so they needed a bunch of instrument cables that we didn't have available. Luckily, Pranav knew someone with some instrument cables and was able to obtain them, and the sound company was able to provide the rest, so the crisis was averted. Second, we weren't sure how to wire their instrumental setup so it could easily be moved after their performance so the stage would be clear for the dance group. We ended up rearranging their setup so all the instruments were on one side, and this was sufficient to allow for quick setup and teardown during the concert itself.
The Ohms went off to eat lunch at some point, but I was preoccupied with managing the sound check logistics and the visiting groups, and then my live stream HDMI cable side quest ran right up until the concert start time, so I didn't get to eat. Ayyub bought me a sandwich and brought it to me right as the concert started, and I ate it backstage in between arrangements. This was a major assist for my show day.
I had been in touch with the caterer from Diwalloween, as well as a couple other local caterers that were recommended to me by various MIT student groups, in mid-November. I ended up placing an order for samosas and chai for our audience and dinner for the Ohms, alohms, and friends. The samosas and chai arrived about halfway through the show, and a couple of our alohms brought these items from the caterer's truck into the lobby. They also helped serve the samosas and chai to our audience after the show. The dinner arrived after the concert, and one of the alohms picked this up. I have now realized that food delivery during a show will always be difficult to coordinate, because it's a risk to have performers leave the venue to go meet the caterer, so I think we'd always be dependent on alohms and friends to coordinate catering at future concerts.
The concert itself went smoothly! I don't think our audience was expecting to be there for so long, but they seemed to enjoy the music as well as the overall presentation of our show. So I'm glad we were able to put together such a grand event to celebrate the group's past, present, and future.
This concert represented a number of new frontiers for the group. First, I think this was the largest concert we had ever staged, in terms of attendance. We were very thankful to have such a large audience to support us in Kresge. Second, at almost 150 minutes this was the longest concert the group had ever had. Third, this was probably the first time we had catered refreshments (samosas and chai) for our audience at such a large scale, and we learned a lot about how we can do this even better in the future!
This academic year has represented a ton of growth and exploration for the group in terms of community involvement and large event planning. Diwalloween in early November was our first time in recent memory hosting an event with invited external groups and a catering order. Then, for this concert, we moved the whole operation to Kresge with three invited groups, a longer show, and a larger catering order.
The next major event on our calendar is Boston Bandish, the new national Desi A Cappella competition that we're organizing in February 2026. We'll now be hosting eight invited groups from around the country, and they will be the center of our attention for a packed event weekend that includes a pre-show mixer on the Friday night, sound check Saturday morning, the concert on Saturday evening, and an afterparty on Saturday night.
I'm glad to have been able to do an effective "dry run" for the competition with this concert, so that I can reflect on what went well and what might be a source of friction during our event weekend. With the wisdom gained from this event, and the support of a committed musical community of Ohms, alohms, and friends, I'm looking forward to a smooth inaugural edition of our competition!