Immersive is the AV sector’s new buzzword, and when it comes to sound, the industry is already looking at a plethora of immersive possibilities for both live sound and broadcast. As Carolyn Heinze’s article in Church Production’s November 2018 issue revealed (see story link on p. 44), the house-of-worship market appears ready to begin integrating these immersive-type sonic experiences for live sound.
“Immersive sound is still in its infancy....It’s not an off-the-shelf propositionat this stage.”
“I honestly don’t know if there is a better place for immersive sound than in a church,” Joshua Maichele, application engineer at L-Acoustics, told her.Immersive sound has the potential to imbue worshippers with a heightened sense of community and engage them at a level that conventional AVL might not. That said, however, immersive sound may face both specific and generic challenges in that environment. For instance, compared to the fairly uniform interior architecture of Broadway theaters and performing arts centers that immersive and object-based live-sound systems have been used in for over a decade now — in which a character’s voice or a musician’s instrument can follow its movement across a stage — churches and other houses of worship are a potpourri of design, ranging from fan-shaped auditoriums and reverberant cathedrals to former mall stores and movie theaters. Finding ways that immersive-system design can consistently accommodate a wide range of installation sites will be challenging.
Immersive is scalable
James King, director of marketing at Martin Audio, which is promoting Sound Adventures, its 3D immersive audio technology developed in partnership with Dutch-based Astro Spatial Audio, says the idea of immersive sound is so new to the market that churches first need to assess what it is they want to accomplish with the technology. “You can go full immersive, with sound elements zooming around the house, which is the far end of the spectrum of what immersive can deliver, or you may simply want to widen the stereo image of your sound for the congregation,” he explains. “Everything [that follows] is determined by that,” including the number and location of speakers needed.”
“This is still in its infancy, so any church that wants to move into immersive sound is going to need help from the manufacturer, from everything from design to operations” he says. “It’s not an off-the-shelf proposition at this stage.”
Their speakers or yours?
Meyer Sound Labs’ planned (and as-yet unnamed) entry for the emerging immersive live-sound sweepstakes for houses of worship is derived from Spacemap. Soundmap is an object-based mapping system developed for several of its earlier electro-acoustical systems, such as D-Mitri, and which is used extensively in Broadway and other theatrical installations. The version developed for the church market (which is expected to be launched in 2019) will enable sound designers to use a dynamic graphical interface to fly sounds through space using any loudspeaker layout, allowing them to “create two-dimensional maps of loudspeakers in a space, customize the power distribution to them, and record paths of sound trajectories that can be recalled as part of a sound cue or mapped to incoming time code,” according to a 2013 white paper on the technology by Steve Ellison, Meyer Sound’s applications director for digital products.
“The first barrier to immersive is [oftentimes] budget….”
Users will be able to deploy the system in conjunction with their existing PA systems, a potentially considerable capital cost savings, says Daniel Rivera, Meyer’s global sales specialist for the house of worship market. “The first barrier to immersive is budget,” he says. “Going immersive with another system can mean tripling the number of boxes in a line-array hang; Meyer’s immersive live-sound system can accomplish that with an existing system’s speakers.” It will also be adaptable to any placement or number of speakers in a PA system, he adds. The new immersive system will integrate with existing sound systems as an additional layer of processing. As such, it can be controlled as part of the overall sound system through the FOH console, or the immersive elements can be controlled separately through a wireless tablet.“The point is that we’re bringing well-developed immersive technology that’s already being used in places like Broadway to a new a market,” says Tim Boot, Meyer’s director, digital Product experience. “They won’t need to have to start from scratch to enjoy immersive sound.”
Connecting what we hear to what we see
L-Acoustics’ L-ISA—the acronym is for Immersive Sound Art—was nearly five years in the making and can scale from a minimum of five L-Acoustics sound sources across the performance zone, and can go up to as many as 64 sources. Supplementing the performance zone is what L-Acoustics terms its Immersive Hyperreal Sound System, which envelops the audience with additional sound sources and effects. At the hub of the installation is a L-ISA Processor that provides object-based mixing of up to 96 audio sources routed into 64 speaker outputs. The L-ISA Controller software offers five control parameters: pan, width, distance, elevation, and an aux send. In a live application, the L-ISA processor is inserted between the output of the FOH console and the loudspeaker amps and will support MADI, up to 96 kHz. The system, which requires the use of L-Acoustics speakers, is expected to be installed in four churches in the United States within the first half of this year [2019].
“What we’re doing is creating a panorama for the stage, one that connects what we see to what we hear in a service. It breaks down the walls between the pastor and the audience.”
Joshua Maichele, L-Acoustics’ house-of-worship specialist, acknowledges that it remains to be seen the extent to which the church market will respond to immersive sound at this level, but he says that one important component of the system could help move it forward. “What we’re doing is creating a panorama for the stage, one that connects what we see to what we hear in a service,” he explains, referring to the ability of the L-ISA audio to follow a speaker around and across a stage. “It breaks down the walls between the pastor and the audience. Over the last 20 years, we’ve been seeing longer and longer stage thrusts in churches, as pastors try to get deeper into audience, sometimes to the point where the people in the first few rows have to turn around to see him. So it’s not really ‘immersive’ sound that will work best in the house-of-worship environment, but rather the kind of audio that connects the speaker and the listener.”But the next generation of sound in the sanctuary will still face conventional challenges, Maichele concedes.
For instance, the need to array at least five speaker hangs requires close coordination with video teams to optimize sightlinesfor multiple video screens. As a result, there are skills that many systems integrators will have to obtain in the future, although he says integrators will be necessary bridges between early iterations of this kind of audio and the rest of the AVL in churches.At least for initial L-ISA installations, L-Acoustics engineers are providing extensive support on all of the design work, with the integration work accomplished by company-certified integration partners. L-Acoustics plans to release the design tools to a broader range of users, such as designers and consultants, in 2019. That, he feels, will help sound catch up to the kinds of technical advances that he feels video and lighting have made in churches in recent years.“Video and lighting have come further along in churches than has audio in the last few years,” Maichele contends. “I think that object-based sound is the future, and what will bring sound up to the same level as video and lighting.”
Optimizing for speech and music
The d&b Soundscape system, from d&b audiotechnik, was just finishing up its first church installation at the First Assembly Church in Calgary, Alberta in early December. Asher Dowson, d&b’s HOW segment manager, says d&b Soundscape’s technology, which based on its Dante-enabled DS100 Signal Engine and two software modules: d&b En-Scene (for sound object positioning) and d&b En-Space (a room emulator that will add and/or modify a space’s reverberation signatures), is being deployed across a range of applications, including the church market and touring, for which the electronic-music band Kraftwerk served as a beta opportunity. Sonic localization for each seat in the house is the goal, he says.
“Soundscape utilizes level and delay to enable the ear-brain system to localize sources wherever placed on stage, regardless of where one is seated in the audience,” he explains, which ensures coherent time alignment at each seat, despite differences in level between them.
“I think object-based sound is the future, and what will bring sound up to the same level as video and lighting.”
That’s accomplished using the DS100’s 64 X 64 crosspoint matrix and applying En-Scene, so that each sound object corresponds both visually and acoustically, and/or En-Space, to add and modify reverberation signatures for a space.There are three main configurations for Soundscape: a 180-degree basic en-Scene set up using distributed speakers across the front of the stage—the version Dowson expects most churches would opt for; a 360-degree En-Scene template in which some sound effects can be added for events such as seasonal pageants; and a full-scale 360 En-Space+En-Space configuration with room emulation.
“The good news here is that consultants no longer have to have trade offs between intelligible speech and reverberation for music and worship,” Dowson says. “This can be optimized for both.”
An immersive future
Immersive live sound for houses of worship is at its very earliest stages as a pro audio category, but given the rapid uptake of immersive-sound technologies for other markets, staff at houses of worship can expect to be marketed heavily on this in the very near future. What they can also expect are systems that will need to be designed and implemented largely by the manufacturers themselves, as they look to establish installations that can serve as models for potential customers.
The systems will vary in their requirements, such as whether churches will need to buy additional speakers, and what types those may need to be. Operationally, they can expect a new layer of complexity, though manufacturers, all of which are familiar with the volunteer nature of church technical staff, are working to streamline that. What churches can look forward to, though, is being on the cusp of an audio revolution that could provide an entirely new level of congregational envelopment.
