Dimension provided the audio infrastructure for the giant automated themed pavilion at the Swiss National Exhibition, Expo.02 (May-October 2002), for production company Live Communication. Pip Campbell was lead producer and Adam Wildi was technical director. Entitled ‘Empire of Silence’, the adventure pavilion is sponsored by telecoms giant Swisscom.
The ‘Empire of Silence’ project highlights how essential communication has become in today’s world. Soundscape designer and Dimension project manager Kevin Swain was handed the demanding audio brief back in July 2001. The solution was to automate the entire exhibit, with a Conductor show control system firing multiple audio cues via MIDI (and interfacing with the Wholehog Piglet desk to send MIDI Show Control signals to the lighting fixtures).
The central audio control device is the RSD AudioBox DSP engine from Richmond Sound Design. The AudioBox is a 16-in/16-out fully programmable matrix with level and EQ control. Contained onboard is a 16-track, 20Gb hard disk, with eight analogue inputs for external sources - all controlled by MIDI commands. Dimension Audio have used two together, offering a combined 32 tracks - all of which are utilized, and all controlled by MIDI commands, as well as taking signals from external sources.
Included in the scope of the control are a cinema and a number of 28" video monitors, with MPEG2 audio and video databases encoded via Video Kiosk. Dimension take the soundtrack directly off the MPEG server, with all other sound effects triggered from the AudioBox hard disks. A film is shown in the cinema via two Christie Digital X6 Roadies, supplied by CT. As the scale of the requirements increased, a second AudioBox was configured with eight digital and four analogue inputs to run an animated ‘silencing machine’, with playback through EV S200s.For Swain, the biggest challenges were timecoding and avoiding sound leakage. Timecode was from the AudioBoxes’ internal clocks: "We designed the sound based on 45dB attenuation between areas, and a huge amount of acoustic treatment ensured separation between rooms," said Swain - no mean feat, as the cacophony of effects can peak at around 105-108dB. "The other difficulty was assigning sound feeds from the Audioboxes to ensure that we didn’t run out of tracks," he said. "We had four tracks running on two MPEG2 servers, plus four live mics and 32 channels assigned from the hard disks - 31 running simultaneously." He adds it would have been impossible without the AudioBoxes, which were purchased from Aura Sound.
Dimension also purchased Martin Audio C516 high-powered ceiling speakers for the project, while from stock they pulled d&b E9, E3 and E18 speakers, plus QSC and d&b amps, Sony radio mics, JBL Control 1s and a BSS 9088 Soundweb, operating between the radio mics and AudioBoxes, for EQ, level control and compression.
