Working to combine music, art and technology ‘in ways that will immerse her audiences in an audiovisual experience that transcends the confines of the performance space’, UK-based electronic music producer and A/V artist Halina Rice recently staged a live show in London at the Copeland Gallery using L-ISA Studio 3D audio software and L-Acoustics loudspeakers.

‘Some tracks I create are more like sound pieces, she explains. ‘They don’t have a tempo or a structure, so I can position sounds coming from all around, and the lights are coming from all around. It puts people in a different space.’

Rice and visual artist and interactive designer Jan Petyrek first experienced L-Acoustics immersive sound capabilities when they performed at Abbey Road Studios’ 36-hour Hackathon 2019, but the coronavirus pandemic put further exploration of immersive audio on hold.

Then, in December 2021, Rice organised her show at the Copeland Gallery, programming her tracks with L-ISA Studio and performing through a 360° surround array of L-Acoustics X8 coaxial speakers in combination with mixed reality, 3D, generative and audio-reactive visuals and lighting.

‘I’m not a visual designer, but I art direct on these projects,’ she says. ‘If I can’t figure out how to do something, I find someone who does. It’s important to find the right people, wherever they are.’

As the date for her show at the Copeland Gallery approached, she conferred with Stephen Hughes at Delta Live and with Chris McDonnell, L-ISA application design engineer at L-Acoustics. ‘I played some tracks for them and Chris gave me some great advice to translate these to the L-ISA system,’ she reports.

‘It’s a challenge to start with, because you’re bouncing more stems than you would normally bounce, and you don’t know until you’ve done one of these projects exactly what it’s going to sound like. But once you’ve got that, it’s not difficult.’

Working on her MacBook with L-ISA Studio, she says, ‘The binaural mix, in headphones, gave me a really clear sense of what I was doing. Many sounds were static, and there were soundscape pieces that were moving fairly dramatically.’

Once in the Copeland Gallery, she and sound engineer, Ben Davey, stood in the room, listened, and adjusted a few things; we had time during the installation day, so we experimented. And I found it wonderful working with the L-Acoustics crew there; they were extremely generous in trying to make sure that I felt I had the best sound possible. Now that I’ve worked in this way, I would feel confident that I could do those mixes just in binaural and go straight to the venue.’

Currently, Rice drives the audio component of her show using an Ableton Push controller and L-ISA software on a laptop. L-ISA’s object-based workflow is an extension of her former stem-based approach. ‘I was previously bouncing five or six major stems: drums, bass, synths, vocals, VFX, etcetera. I realised I had more opportunity to space these, pinpoint different sounds and move them in different ways. Now, I bounce, let’s say, ten stems. Within those stems I write the automation for distance, width and panning. A lot of those objects are static; you don’t necessarily want a kick drum moving around. But a lot of the synths might have a small movement. And all of that movement is pre-programmed.’

There is also live audio: ‘I have a set of live tracks over the top of everything, which feed through the L-ISA system. My energy during the show is in the live sampling, which is then fed through a pair of outputs into a particular placement in the L-Acoustics speaker array.’

Separate from the audio, Rice maps herself into the mixed reality visuals as an avatar with Microsoft’s Kinect motion controller. The visual side of her show is further enhanced with pre-recorded generative art, developed in collaboration with Freny Antony (@procedural.disarray). Rice is also assisted by event producer Sophie Charrington, who is an AR and VR producer.

‘Through serendipity, I’ve created an immersive product at the moment when immersive concepts seem to be taking off,’ she observes. But there are still challenges to solve before her next shows – the first at Sonica in Glasgow followed closely by a show at Iklectik in London. In particular, Rice says, she would like to build a system to trigger the visuals herself. ‘I’ll get so far with it, but I’ll be reaching out to friends and contacts to help me.

‘Producing for immersive sound may look intimidating from the outside, but my encouragement would be to get through the first threshold of getting familiar with the software and new workflow, which is the toughest,’ she adds.

More: www.l-acoustics.com