Woolf Works – a ballet triptych is based on Virginia Woolf as viewed through her three major novels – was Wayne McGregor’s first full-length work for the Royal Ballet, and has been revived for a performance at Covent Garden’s Royal Opera House. The high-tech multimedia production features an original score by Max Richter that called for a complex sound design by Chris Ekers, supported by TiMax2 SoundHub spatial audio processing.

The original challenges of a score incorporating both electronic music and a live orchestra, set in an environment not optimally suited to amplification, had largely been addressed previously. Bringing TiMax multichannel spatial audio production workflows to the new production meant that it was mostly a case of, ‘recalling the show file and off we went’ according to Ekers.

Versatility and ease-of-reset are the principal reasons TiMax was essential to the multi-element spatial sound design: ‘The key thing here is that rehearsal and production time for a revival is scheduled to a bare minimum,’ Ekers explains. ‘The opera house does not have a device to control every loudspeaker from one place and originally TiMax enabled us to create just that very quickly. This time around, what is especially good about TiMax SoundHub is that all system settings were immediately recalled, along with all the localisation and dynamic spatialisation data.’

With more than 100 loudspeakers in the Royal Opera House to call on, the orchestra was fed with varying spatial signatures throughout the distributed house system. For the electronic segments, an additional speaker system was positioned upstage, but due to space constraints the techno parts’ low end was provided by two sub bass cabinets positioned onstage, just inside the proscenium and facing towards each other across the stage, These subs were upstage of the orchestra by about 3.5m but downstage of the main techno speaker system by about 20m so the timing relationship between them all was critical.

When the techno elements were running, TiMax delay-matrixed the audio content back to the onstage system, and then seamlessly segued to the spatially amplified orchestral passages from the live orchestra in the pit. As Ekers points out, ‘Switching between delay set-ups, when you’ve got a signal path playing electronic music that’s heavily delayed back on to the stage, and then going into a system where you’re focussing on an acoustic source from the orchestra pit – to seamlessly go back and forth – TiMax is really the only device that can do that.’

Throughout the three distinct sections of the triptych, TiMax object-based spatial rendering offered innovative solutions to audio challenges and also enabled imaginative responses to the detail of Max Richter’s score with its wealth of 3D soundscaping opportunities. Ekers maintains the simplicity and control, which the TiMax SoundHub provides, over a vast and complex audio system and production, was a defining motivator for its use.

‘What is really important in this production is the option to have various independent sources mixed to multiple outputs with different delay times. There are other ways this could be achieved, but not without using valuable buses and lots of production time, which we certainly didn’t have second time around for a revival. If we hadn’t had TiMax this time around, I don’t know how we would have achieved the result we’ve had.’

See also:
Woolf Works with TiMax at Royal Opera House

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