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Teatro de la Laboral, Laboral University, Gijón, Spain / Project Completion: 2007
Teatro Municipal de Las Condes, Santiago, Chile / Project Completion: 2010
MUMUTH Hall, Graz, Austria / Project Completition 2008
sound from the audience, creating an acoustic environment that feels much more open and less detached from the main auditorium.” Another consideration is lateral energy. This is provided by UP-4XP loudspeakers that are mounted on the balcony fronts and behind strips of Eurospan on the sidewalls of the stage, and from UPJunior speakers situated above the doors at the side of the stage. “A very important ingredient of a good acoustic is lateral energy. Our ears are more sensitive to lateral energy than overhead; it’s just the way we’re built. In the Eurospan panels that you can see below the side balconies, we have small loudspeakers that inject a small amount into the room to give people sitting near the edges of the balconies and at the edges of the auditorium seating, a feeling that they are near a reflective, and not near an absorptive wall,” said John. In the main body of the auditorium overhead reverberation is generated from Stella-4C loudspeakers underneath the balconies and over the upper balcony. Stella-8C loudspeakers are distributed throughout the ceiling space, and in the overhead reflector above the stage, in front of the proscenium. There are eight UMS subwoofers distributed throughout the auditorium. Lateral UP-4XP loudspeakers mounted in the balcony fronts provide the main source of lateral energy in the hall. Despite the amount of equipment, the installation is discreet. “That was the idea, we didn’t want people to come into the room and immediately notice lots of loudspeakers and mics,” explained John. The stage is serviced by UPJunior speakers hanging on steel cables on either side and by UPM-1P speakers flown overhead. There are four rows of four UPM-1P speakers, matched with four UPJuniors on each side, and a further four UPM-1P speakers on the back wall. Microphones hang from the same fly bars, four on each, totalling 16 over the stage. Each of the 72 microphones in the hall has been deployed with a particular purpose in mind. Some are distributed high into the ceiling, above the reverberation radius, to capture ambient sound. Others, that can be seen hanging above the downstage edge, are designed to capture sound from within the reverberation radius - capturing direct sound from the performers. “The stage mics serve not just for reverberation, but generating early reflections too. Musicians and performers need early reflections in order to localise and hear each other properly across stage, and with an appropriate amount of reverberation, they enjoy a balance of envelopment and clarity. The same thing goes for the audience. Reverberation on its own diminishes clarity, but if you add early reflections then you can make a nice blend of the two, and then it’s great for classical music. Constellation offers separate control of each.” In terms of design, the system is complex, yet to the end user it is remarkably simple. The touch screen recalls pre-programmed presets that are accessible with the touch of a button. To use the system, it takes one operator and ten minutes to deploy. “We have, together with our scientists and engineers at Meyer, come up with very strict design rules and guidelines. They influence the amount of power we need, the number of loudspeakers, the distribution of the loudspeakers and the types of loudspeakers. In order to do that design work we need to know the cubic volume of the hall and the anticipated unassisted reverberation time. The amount of desired reverberant gain increase dictates the density of the system, and we obviously design with that in mind.” Constellation has enjoyed success in a number of applications since its debut at California Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall. Installations at Spain’s Laboral University, Chile’s Teatro Municipal de Las Condes, Austria’s MUMUTH Hall and an outdoor space at Miami Beach’s New World Center (page 80) have followed. Success is usually coupled with criticism, and not everybody has immediately warmed to the concept of Constellation. “There’s certainly been issues in Europe with the traditionalists, but that is breaking down. I think that in other regions of the world like North America, South America, Australia, the Far East
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