World Stage: What’s The Frequency, Karlheinz?
And you think you’ve worked some unusual gigs...
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When noted German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen presents a new work, it’s a safe bet that conventions will be broken. In this case, it’s good that nothing else was. |
Each of the four string players performed within an airborne Black Hawk helicopter (courtesy of the Austrian Army), while a huge audience listened (and watched) from an airline hanger.
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Sound was supplied by Neumann & Mueller of Munich, Germany, with project leader Wolfram Kolb noting that the violin sound was captured with a relatively inexpensive piezzo pickup after evaluation of several microphones. Background noise from the helicopters was a planned part of the performance; in fact, a Sennheiser MKE 2 was positioned on the nose of the chopper. The two devices, plus a vocal mic on each aircraft, transmitted signal back to the hangar via a powerful transmitter system from Tandberg used for commercial audio/video broadcast applications. |
Actually, it was the huge all-glass hanger, complete with concrete floor and an audience area several hundred feet wide and deep, that presented the real sound reinforcement challenges. Plus Stockhausen’s composition required a spatial awareness of the four instruments, requiring four separate PA systems.
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Neumann & Mueller chose to use d&b Q-Series line arrays to attain the necessary pattern control and dispersion for the unusual application. “For aesthetic reasons a line array was really the only option. A point source system would have required delays every 15 meters, and the roof couldn’t support that much equipment,” Kolb explains. The Q1 principal component supplies 75-degree horizontal pattern, which helped distribute coverage across the width of the crowd, and the lighter weight of the systems helped allay overload concerns. |
“There was some small problems with a party group at the back of the
hangar chatting throughout, and of course there were still scheduled flights
taking off from Salzburg Airport. But the acoustic impression matched
exactly the projected images of the four violinists up on the video screens,”
Kolb concludes.
Next time, how about an opera performed in a submarine for an audience
on the deck of an aircraft carrier? Just a thought...
December 2003 Live Sound International