This year's dramatic medley included Lord of the Flies, Beggar's Opera, with a children's version of Pericles running concurrently under it during the day time, and the light and entertaining Gershwin musical, Crazy for You. Walker explains the one common factor driving his sound design for this diverse mix of performances, "It's about pulling the audio image back to the performer, so that what an audience member sees and what they hear is credible - the audio has to match the picture.
"To do what we're doing in this space, you really need a delay-matrix like TiMax. Last year, we used the TiMax SoundHub for Into The Woods and manually triggered the required presets. This year we decided that to make the system more flexible we would use the TiMax Tracker to alleviate the need for so many cues. We used the TiMax system for this one specific job of focus and realism - I like to keep things simple because when we're not, we're getting in the way - and if we get in the way, the audience no longer believe it."
The essential open air nature of the auditorium and lack of roof dictated that the speaker setup comprised just a few front-fill loudspeakers, a row of delays and some larger cabinets in the proscenium arch left and right positions. TiMax addresses this "not at all ideal" positioning by defining localisation zones on the stage, left to right as well as upstage and downstage, which are then mapped via its delay-matrix onto the multi-channel Opus Audio loudspeaker system, supplied and crewed by Mike Walker's Loh-Humm production resource company .
This creates accurately localised sound reinforcement which ensures all audience members relate directly to each performer's stage location at any time. Walker stresses the necessity, "In matinees and the earlier part of the evening performances where lighting cannot help, only audio can give you a clue as to where people actually are. The open stage is a big expanse in which you have to pull focus in order to know who is speaking."
TiMax2 addressed the second issue in the auditorium, in Walker's words, "The slightly thrust stage. While it doesn't seem to stick out into the auditorium much, it sticks out enough to create a 90 degree quadrant from the centre of the stage. This means that the proscenium loudspeakers are already half way upstage. The zoning of the TiMax delivers the multi-point source localisation that standard delay techniques for vocal localisation cannot. He continues, "The two dimensionality of the proscenium arch often helps with that but in this case, without TiMax, nothing is helping it at all."
The TiMax set up for the theatre's summer season - with initial on-site assistance provided by Out Board's Robin Whittaker - was straightforward even with two shows in rep. "The fact that the shows were in rep caused us no problems, we simply created a setup that served both shows. The scenery for both had to coexist and so we treated the sound design similarly. The scene changes for Pericles and Beggar's Opera may have seemed considerable but the fundamental format or footprint didn't change."
(Jim Evans)
