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44 l July 2013


www.psneurope.com


installationnews UNITED KINGDOM This could get loud


As this issue of PSNEuropewent to press, an unusual and ambitious performance took place at the Souter Lighthouse in South Shields, UK. Erica Basnicki reports on the Foghorn Requiem


ON 22 JUNE, the foghorn at Souter Lighthouse took the lead in a specially-composed Foghorn Requiem, written by celebrated British composer Orlando Gough. The piece was commissioned by South Tyneside Council and the National Trust, which took over the running of Souter following its decommissioning in 1988. In addition to the lighthouse


foghorn, the requiem was performed by three brass bands, accompanied by vessels of all shapes and sizes (including a DFDS ferry!) which sounded their horns – Tyfons by Kockum Sonics – to a musical score.


Artists Lise Autogena and


Joshua Portway collaborated with Gough to remotely ‘conduct’ and control the roughly 40 ships dotted across a space of several miles off the coast. Speaking to PSNEurope


before the performance, Portway said the idea for the requiem “started with sound, rather than anything else. When we went to the lighthouse we saw that most of the building was actually taken up with equipment to run the foghorn rather than the light itself. “There’s an entire huge room


Souter Lighthouse, the sight of the


Foghorn Requiem


which has compressors and air tanks just to create the air to power the foghorn. They’re quite monstrous when you see them; they’re machines the size of a very large truck, and there’s two of them, and there are gigantic tanks that go from floor to ceiling and these are all just to make a sound, and you start to think ‘My God,


UNITED KINGDOM Sync or swim By Erica Basnicki


CELEBRATING ITS status as the UK’s City of Culture, the Northern Ireland city of Derry/Londonderry has staged an array of events, the highlight of which was The Return of Colmcille – a dramatic showdown staged along a mile of the River Foyle. Needing complex delay


matrices to keep the sound from the moving dredger (where the Loch Ness monster was perched) in sync with the PA system along the shore, Melvyn Coote, MD of the event’s audio production


company tube UK, and FOH engineer/system programmer John Redfern chose Yamaha DME digital mixing engines as the ideal solution. The live and recorded audio


was mixed on a Yamaha CL5 console and two Rio3224-D I/O units in a cabin on the riverside. The monster’s sound effects were sent wirelessly from the CL5 to the dredger. An onboard Yamaha LS9-16 console and DME24N submixed the sounds, before broadcasting them through the onboard loudspeakers. At the furthest point, this meant sending the sounds from the


cabin to the dredger nearly a kilometre of delay time ‘early’, so they would be broadcast from the dredger at the right time. As the ‘monster’ made its way up the river, the onboard crew had 16 pre-programmed GPS waypoints, corresponding with different length delays, where


the DME24N was adjusted to bring it into sync with the shore audio system. “We needed a huge amount


of continually-changing delays,” said Coote. “The delay matrix in the Yamaha DME is one of the only products that allows you to do it and on this show we had all three units


working at their limits. But despite the complexity, once everything was programmed they made it comparatively straightforward to operate. John was triggering scenes via QLab and MIDI straight into the DMEs and it worked really well.”n www.yamahaproaudio.com


The Loch Ness monster makes its mile-long


journey up the River Foyle


A vessel is loaded up with a Kockum Sonics Tyfon ship horn


what kind of sound requires huge engines like this?’” To synchronise the ships’ horns to the music and the lighthouse foghorn, each vessel has a microcomputer and GPS tracker with a radio communication module on board. Using software Portway developed himself, the computers track the ships’ position relative to the co-ordinates of the musicians on shore, sounding the horn with the travel time of sound taken into account. A master computer on shore inside the


lighthouse monitors radio communication signals. Recording the entire


performance is wildlife recordist Geoff Sample, whose work has frequently appeared on the BBC, and an additional three other volunteers: one inside the lighthouse approximately 9m up, another quarter of a mile from the site and a third – Sample’s son – tracking the brass band as they proceed in from roughly half a mile away to the site. “It’s such a good piece of


music that the brass needs to be reasonably well recorded all the


way through, rather than having it start in the distance,” said Sample. The final recording will consist of four stereo tracks, recorded using a Sennheiser MKH30/40 MS setup, a DPA 4060 binaural setup and a Pearl MS microphone, plus an additional stereo pair. According to Sample, the biggest challenge is recording the foghorn itself: “It’s so loud. It’s a little bit like if one records thunder; you have to have the playback system whacked up really loud to convey what it’s like, but then everything else sounds really quiet.” As for Portway, he answered


his own question when he heard the foghorn up close, describing it as “the loudest thing I had ever heard in my life. It was a monster; a very saw-toothy, brassy, harsh sound.” May his ears rest in peace. n


www.foghornrequiem.org www.wildsong.co.uk


Organisers of the Foghorn Requiemreact to hearing the blast at close range


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