The month-long Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts (PIFA) mixes dance, music, visual arts, theatre, film and literature includes ‘Styling a Second Empire: A Light and Sound Experience,’ staged adjacent to City Hall. The event uses an audio system designed by local consulting firm Metropolitan Acoustics

‘They’re lighting up the first five blocks down South Broad Street from City Hall,’ says Saben Shawhan, senior A/V systems consultant at Metropolitan Acoustics.

He was engaged by architectural lighting designer Alfred Borden, Principal at The Lighting Practice: ‘They contacted us to help with the sound design and also to help with synchronising the audio with the lighting, which we’re doing with time code and a flash-based audio player,’ he explains.

The sound system comprises two stacks of four EAW KF740 three-way line array modules plus two EAW SB1002 dual 18-inch subwoofers. EAW FB174 flybar/ground-stack frames support each cluster, while six Lab.gruppen fp14000 amplifiers power the two stacks, managed by two EAW UX8800 four-channel digital signal processors. A Lab.gruppen NLB 60E NomadLink bridge and network controller, along with a Crestron CP2e and TPS-6x touchpanel, handle automated power sequencing and scheduling of the three nightly show times. An EAW DX1208 DSP Matrix Mixer routes signals within the system.

The options for positioning the EAW speakers were restricted by the National Historical Landmark status of Philadelphia’s City Hall, which at one time was the tallest habitable building – and is still the second tallest masonry building – in the world. ‘There was no possibility of getting rigging points,’ Shawhan says. ‘They wouldn’t even let us put a steel cable around a column or open certain windows. The only location that all of the City Hall entities would approve was the 700 level roof, and it’s 127 feet about street level.’

Students at University of Arts in Philadelphia, which is just down the street from City Hall, have generated the audio and lighting content for displays that are positioned on various buildings along south Broad Street. ‘It’s a one-hour block that runs three times nightly from sundown to about midnight each night for the six-week period,’ says Shawhan. The stereo soundtrack of original music is being played from a Tascam HS-8 flash-based eight-track player that is also producing time code. The time code is then fed into a Strand Light Palette VL console, to provide synchronisation between the audio and visual systems. The Crestron system provides basic on/off control, level and routing control for the show. It also automates the three nightly show times so that it can run daily without an operator.

Starlite Productions – who provided technical and logistical support – called on the students and project interns to push all of the equipment down three long hallways, up a freight elevator and then carry everything up three flights of stairs just to get to the approved location on the building’s roof. ‘Then they had to assemble the ground stacks, safety them off and get cable to each location,’ Shawhan says.

He used the EAW Resolution speaker prediction software program when designing the system: ‘The coverage is really good from about 300 feet back from City Hall out to about 1,000 feet, then airborne absorption takes over. At the 300-foot mark in the middle of South Broad St we’re at about 86dBA. Back at 1,200 feet it’s at 80dBA – and that’s with the speaker clusters 127 feet off the ground and only four boxes a side.’

For PIFA 2011, the City of Brotherly Love has taken its inspiration from the City of Light in 1911, when Paris was a centre of creativity in music, literature and visual arts. This first-time arts festival takes over stages, museums and public spaces in Philadelphia from7 April to 1 May and features 31 commissions, 135 events and more than 140 arts partners.

More: www.metropolitanacoustics.com
More: www.starlite.com
More: www.eaw.com