Switzerland’s Thunerseespiele – open-air musical productions staged during the summer months – gave Out Board’s TiMax a ‘world first’ when its SOR audio localisation was used to track a new production of Romeo and Juliet. Performed in a massive half-pipe with a cast of BMX stunt bikers and skateboarders, the production was an ultra-modernised reworking of Shakespeare’s classic tale of love and tragedy billed as Romeo and Julia. 

One actor noted the peculiarity of spouting classical prose while hurtling up an 8m-high ramp, but ambitious production concepts are not new Thun’s vast open-air lakeside amphitheatre, which has previously staged lavish productions of Jesus Christ Superstar, Titanic and Aida. Since 2009 all have been supported with TiMax source-oriented reinforcement (SOR) sound designs by Thomas Strebel, whose experienced audiopool engineers also crew the events, with TiMax system design and programming support from Out Board’s Robin Whittaker.

Thunerseespiele used a TiMax SoundHub audio showcontrol delay-matrix system controlled by TiMax Tracker automation, such that transmitter tags worn by each performer send radar-frequency UWB chirps to sensors around the stage, which then send positional information the TiMax SoundHub in real time. SoundHub then applies morphing delay algorithms to each performer’s radio mic to ensure that audience members locate their voice correctly on stage.

This is achieved by independently varying the delay relationships between each artist’s radio mic and a distributed speaker system – d&b audiotechnik T10s set on poles in the audience and mounted on the stage lip as cross-firing imaging ‘anchors’, with d&b Q7s hidden behind scrims in the stage-front, and further Q7 anchors mounted in the down-stage far left and right vertical walls of the half-pipe itself.

‘In a theatre you can work with light to highlight certain people,’ Strebel explains. ‘In Thun, the performances will also be held during the day, before nightfall – it is therefore important that you can locate the position of each actor precisely based on their voice. Otherwise it is too difficult to understand what is happening on a large stage. TiMax SoundHub gives us the processing and software tools to do this and TiMax Tracker makes it all fully automatic. Ironically, once its working you don’t know its there, but if you switch it off it’s really uncomfortable.’

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