More than two in the making before being inaugurated by Sweden’s Queen Silvia, Stockholm’s prestigious Lilla Akademien music school has a new concert hall – a stunning auditorium that serves as a small performance space for professional live music concerts, a rehearsal room for the music school’s students and an inspiring setting for creative learning. Its Genelec soud system works equally well for live classical music performed acoustically, electroacoustic music, and live-streamed concerts.

‘We wanted to give students – and everyone who performs in the Hall – somewhere to truly immerse themselves in their instrument,’ explains Lilla Akademien’s Artistic Advisor, Mark Tatlow.

Having identified the most suitable building on campus for the project – one that has the greatest potential for both design and functionality – Italian architect Giorgio Palù set the bar high for the design aesthetics and left the venue’s acoustics in the capable hands of Japanese acoustician, Yasuhisa Toyota. The unusual layout of the auditorium required close collaboration from a team of international professionals across a range of disciplines, including leading Swedish integrator, Informationsteknik.

‘Despite its relatively small 300-seat capacity, this is one of the most complex projects I have been involved in,’ Informationsteknik Technical Director Marcus Haraldsson Boij says. ‘The combination of a centrally located stage, the long reverberation time of acoustic classical music – and a design requirement to minimise the number of visible loudspeakers – made it very interesting from an acoustic design point of view.’

Boij, an experienced musician with a background in sound engineering, understood the constraints of the building’s cavernous architecture and set about sourcing a flexible sound system that could work just as well for acoustic and non-acoustic music. ‘We needed to distribute high-quality sound close to the audience without it playing louder than the reverb. Without a traditional “left/right” stage and with the audience seated at three different levels surrounding the orchestra, it demanded a different way of thinking – and while I wanted more speakers, it simply wasn’t possible given the design of the hall.’

To limit the amount of reflected sound in the room it was important to limit the output level of the loudspeakers making Genelec’s Smart IP range of networked models an obvious candidate: ‘By positioning them around the space, we avoided using a traditional line array system, which would have been too obtrusive in this setting,’ Boij says. ‘Instead, we created a unique distributed sound system which used the volume of the entire hall while still giving the audience a sound that felt both rich and intimate.’

The Informationsteknik team specified 22 Smart IP 4420 models and four 4430s. Painted in RAL 1036 gold, the 4430s were the only visible loudspeakers of the entire installation. Two pairs were suspended below the first level balcony, blending with the décor. Additional pairs of the compact 4420s were installed every few metres across each section of the curved wall in between the windows, cleverly hidden in specially insulated recessed boxes.

‘We knew that with the way the walls were constructed, and the design requirements imposed upon us, pulling cables was going to be a problem,’ Boij says. ‘Consequently, the Smart IP active loudspeaker family was the perfect choice since this avoided having to worry about housing external amplifiers – and Smart IP’s single cable technology made cabling much easier. It was a great solution for us.’

For Lilla Akademien, it was essential that the hall met the dual demands of classical music tradition and the music of tomorrow. Not only did the active design of Genelec loudspeakers eliminate the need for external amplifiers, but providing multichannel sound over the Dante network was an unexpected bonus for the school’s students.

‘Using a digital audio workstation, our composition students can connect to the hall and create pieces by combining the live acoustics of the Concert Hall with electronic sounds or music,’ Tatlow says. ‘The network allows discrete control of each loudspeaker to move sound around the room, and the design of the Hall itself encourages students to take the next step in their music making – so the possibilities are huge.’