INSIDE THE SHELL

Following sold-out debut performances in 2021, the Aurora Orchestra returned to London’s Printworks during the venue’s final run of shows earlier this year, combining the potential of an orchestra playing from memory with the vast scale of the iconic Press Halls to give a uniquely immersive experience of Beethoven’s mighty Fifth Symphony. Headliner was fortunate enough to attend one of the events, which featured immersive acoustic shell audio reinforcement provided by d&b audiotechnik and Southby Productions, and offered a completely fresh and revelatory take on classical music.

The aim of the Aurora Orchestra, artist and composer Nwando Ebizie, and Southbank Centre, who teamed up with Printworks to bring the performance to fruition, was to explode the orchestra across the space, enabling listeners to experience the music from inside, and get up close to instrumentalists as they perform in ways that would be impossible in a concert hall.

As Headliner enters the famous press halls, soothing purplish white lights fill the space as a lingering mist drifts slowly up towards the room’s lofty industrial metal ceiling. A droning electronic soundscape is playing, giving the feeling of an ominous otherworldly presence, interspersed with giant, distant booms like the footsteps of a dinosaur in the next room. As Headliner moves around the space, the sinister tones ebb and flow with lush, somber chords, eventually building to a dramatic crescendo of shrill, alarming tones.

All the while, people are milling around the floor in small groups, either drinking or conversing about the spectacle to come. A number of elevated platforms are dotted around the room in formation – some already adorned with big band instruments – and as the anticipation in the room builds, the section members meander their way through the crowd towards each platform.

After a few seconds wait with bated breath, Beethoven’s Fifth bursts into life; the familiar opening chords of ‘dun dun dun dun’ sends shivers down the spine as spotlights illuminate each section of the orchestra in sync with the music. The sound feels enveloping, almost overwhelming at times, but textures of each instrument audibly blend as one melody flows seamlessly to the next. The instruments are powerful and consistent across the space, the strings full and luscious, and the horns huge and imposing. It was incredibly impressive to hear each individual instrument’s placement in the soundscape, while simultaneously being able to appreciate the dramatic, ear-pleasing music filling the room.

Technical director at Southby Productions, Digby Shaw, sound designer David Sheppard and Aurora Orchestra chief executive John Harte were waiting in the wings to answer any questions Headliner had about the d&b audiotechnik Soundscape system. The idea of splitting an orchestra apart and raising them on platforms so the audience could be in and amongst them had meant a system was needed to make everything audible for not only the listeners, but the musicians, given they could no longer hear each other clearly from so far away. d&b’s Adam Hockley worked with Southby to utilize the Soundscape system as an acoustic shell for the performance space.

“The aim was to feed each instrument, close mic’d, into En Space, Soundscape’s convolution reverb processor, which returned the sound with the reflections and reverberations of a real concert hall,” Sheppard tells Headliner “Soundscape allows you to feed sections of the orchestra into left, center and right locations of an early reflection plane which makes positioning and response very believable. The result was a great success.

“When the orchestra played here two years ago, everything had worked but it was felt the instruments still felt a little isolated in the vast space. This time around it was decided that we wanted to achieve a more direct sound - more of a sense of energy and connection to the music.”

To make it work, Sheppard approached the mix similarly to how he would a stereo show, achieving a musically balanced mix that he could monitor on headphones, but bussed to left, center, right.

“These were then sent direct via a Matrix to the En Space engine reflection zones,” he elaborates. “I could then alter the overall level via the LCR faders, and I sub-grouped the orchestral sections, so a re-balance could happen whilst listening in the room if necessary. I then introduced the same L, C, R mix to three En Scene sound objects - three zones of direct to PA, not via reverb - placed over the orchestra. These were then slowly introduced into the mix adding amplification. As everything was closely mic’d we had plenty of headroom before feedback; the combination of the acoustic shell and the reinforcement brought a real intensity to the experience, and it was extremely exciting to be in the center of.”

Sheppard is a fan of using Soundscape to create immersive events, and says that object-based mixing feels very intuitive, adding that “using a 360 speaker system brings freedom to mixing, making it musical and performative. Soundscape has a resolution and depth that makes this truly achievable.

“The unique space of Printworks and its surprisingly clear sound and short reverb time meant that the system Southby installed was perfectly suited to playing with an acoustic response for the musicians. I felt I was able to focus acutely on their needs, rather than feel like I was fighting against a room.”

One of Aurora’s key aims is to bring orchestral music to a wider audience, in less conventional spaces. While the orchestra’s chief executive John Harte initially thought the space might be very boomy acoustically, he was pleasantly surprised by the reality. Because of its history as a printing factory, and the level of sound insulation that necessitated, it actually turned out to be more like a recording studio, with almost no natural reverb.

“This made it a good blank canvas into which to install a Soundscape system to give us a suitable artificial acoustic for performing,” explains Harte. “The key goals were twofold. Firstly, we wanted simply to introduce as many new listeners to orchestral music as possible. In this respect the project was an unqualified success: across the two performances we welcomed over 3,600 people, the vast majority of whom were new to classical music and under the age of 40. This contrasts very sharply with the kind of demographic which is typical for orchestral concerts in the UK, which tends to be an older audience comprising many returning bookers.

“A second goal was to give a radically different immersive experience of an orchestral symphony, conveying some of the thrill that musicians feel when they play as part of an orchestra. Most people never get the chance to experience what it is like to hear an orchestra from inside – we wanted to offer that really visceral experience of being completely surrounded by sound; of being close enough to players to watch their astounding fingerwork and smell the rosin on bows.”

Harte was equally impressed by the d&b Soundscape system itself, and agrees that it lends itself well to orchestral performances such as this.

“There’s no question that this kind of immersive performance format involves some big compromises with sound,” he concludes. “There’s a reason that orchestras have played on stages in concert halls for hundreds of years – if you explode the setup over a width of 70 meters and bring the audience physically inside the orchestra, it’s much, much harder to achieve a perfect ensemble!

“We always knew that there would be musical compromises in the pursuit of the audience and experience we were aiming for. Soundscape allowed us to keep those compromises to a manageable minimum, and there’s no way that this project would have been possible without this kind of spatial system.”