GEAR. IMMERSIVE AUDIO
(not smaller & further away) installation at London’s four-storey Lightroom is one such tricky space, with a reverb time of over six seconds, noise from projector fans and a requirement for the audio system to be hidden – so as not to compromise the visual components. A key element of the brief was ensuring the concrete venue was covered with even, intelligible audio, but adding creative, immersive elements to bring the music and Hockney’s narration to life. “Creating an immersive experience starts with doing the basics better in a room; cleaning things up to create a base canvas, which you then add spatialisation effects to,” describes Holoplot’s segment manager for immersive and experiential applications, Natalia Szczepanczyk. “At Lightroom, this meant taming the challenging acoustic signature of what is essentially a concrete box. Using only two arrays, we added the sense of sound immersion in the space via elements such as virtual sources and specially crafted side-wall reflections. “3D Audio-Beamforming enables us to reduce reverberation by minimising the amount of acoustic energy hitting reflective surfaces, so the sound is targeting only the audience. This can also create different sound fields simultaneously, each with its own content and position with minimum sound spill between zones from the same Matrix Array. The virtual sources are then used to guide the visitors’ gaze to a particular piece of artwork to correspond with Hockney’s narration.” Providing new opportunities to design multiple experiences in the same space, these technologies can change our relationships with the arts by creating brand-new chances for immersion. At the Coda launch, electronic music pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre described it as letting your ears open your eyes. He said: “We have a two-dimensional relationship with recorded sound, but stereo doesn’t exist in nature. It’s the environment which creates perspective, and technology now allows us to create music as we experience sound in our everyday lives. Because the technology is invisible, you forget you are inside the music. The experience has a magical and poetic aspect to it.” “The environment creates perspective, and technology now allows us to create music as we experience sound in our everyday lives”
HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT Coda Audio’s Space panels are sleek speakers that can be integrated with artwork or 4K projection screens. At 70mm deep, these flat sound sources open up a world of possibilities for creative integration of sound and vision
34. DEFINITIONMAGAZINE.COM
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