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Celebrated sound designer Gareth Owen stepped up to the task and created an impressive installation”
Starlight Express is renowned for its innovative technical qualities
so it should come at little surprise that sound is the focus for this example. Last year marked its 40th anniversary, and the famed musical is currently running at the Troubadour Wembley Park Theatre. Celebrated sound designer Gareth Owen stepped up to the task and created an impressive installation of four d&b DS100 processors driving d&b’s Soundscape system through a collection of more than 350 loudspeakers. This latest project stands as one of his most intricate sound system designs to date. Owen first used Soundscape back in 2019 for the high-profile rejuvenation of Starlight Express in Bochum, Germany. He has since become a key exponent of this immersive sound technology. “I have this great story of when Andrew Lloyd Webber went to see the German production of Starlight ,” Owen begins. “He went backstage to the orchestra pit and asked them what they were playing, as it wasn’t what he wrote. He asked to
London and having several musicals run for over a decade in the West End and on Broadway. Starlight Express is yet another of these achievements, with the show first running in 1994, featuring music by Webber and lyrics by Richard Stilgoe. It tells the story of Rusty, a young but obsolete steam engine who decides to race in a championship against modern locomotives – diesel and electric engines – in hopes of impressing a first-class observation car, Pearl. Most notably, the entirety of the bright, spacey show is performed in roller skates. With 7409 performances in London, Starlight Express is the ninth-longest- running West End show. It’s the most successful musical in Germany, where it has been performed in a purpose-built theatre since 1988 – now holding the Guinness World Record for most visitors to a musical in a single theatre. Webber is best known for musical composition,
see the scores, and they replied that they’d been playing it for 30 years and so didn’t need them. He then decided that the show needed a complete refresh in music, sound, lighting – everything. “They closed the show for a couple of weeks, and we went in and replaced the entire sound system. That was our first outing with the d&b Soundscape system, which had only been used once in theatre up until that point. “It was a big success, and Andrew was very happy with it. When it came to doing the new production in London, we were asked to deliver Soundscape for that too.” Having now employed d&b Soundscape on more than a dozen musical theatre sound designs, Owen has been integral to the development of the system. The result of a collaboration between Gareth Owen Sound Design and d&b, En-Snap is a cue automation software that provides significant show control workflow features. “Soundscape is part of this new generation with the buzzword of immersive audio,” continues Owen, “but the reality is that it’s essentially using the cocktail party effect. This is where you can pick out sounds from the mix and allow audiences to hear things in a way that a traditional sound system doesn’t.” This arena-style configuration – with performer action and audience listening zones in all directions – presented some considerable challenges for coverage and coherence. Owen concludes, “In what is a very complicated room, with
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