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TiMax spatial audio transforms UAE’s National Day celebrations

The 2022 UAE’s National Day celebrations, staged in a purpose-built 100 m long enclosed arena with seating along both sides, took the audience on a generational journey of the UAE’s pioneers. Viewers were transported from sea to space through the media of projection-mapped visuals, supported by transformational spatial audio effects delivered by TiMax SoundHub.

TiMax SoundHub spatial processing was specified by event sound designer Scott Willsallen to control and place the show’s many diverse audio sources, which included live orchestra, music playback as well as spatialised soundfield effect elements, to support the action provided by projection mapping, lighting, actors, processions and floats.

TiMax was used to link the sounds associated with the moving performance to the scenic media elements as the procession travelled through, including parts of the musical score from a playback server, as well as spot sound effects from TiMax.

To program movement against the music playback’s audio timeline, individual stem tracks were temporarily imported into TiMax so that movement and spatialisation of external server content could be programmed directly against the audio waveforms. For the soundfield effects elements of the show, individual effects stems were imported to and played back from the TiMax SoundHub’s on-board 64-channel playback engine for spatialisation within the show.

A distributed system of 26 groundstacked and 26 flown L-Acoustics speakers, supported by four end arrays and distributed sub bass units, was loaded into the geometrically aware TiMax PanSpace. PanSpace automatically and selectively calculated the levels and delays for the different layers of TiMax Image Definition objects, defined to suit various combinations of spatial scenarios required for the show.

A set of spatial pans, programmed in the PanSpace environment, were collected into templates to be copied and pasted over the audio waveforms in the TimeLine environment. This action allowed synchronisation to be applied quickly within specific cues as they arose during technical rehearsals.

The sound control room was located remotely from the arena space, so to accommodate this, dedicated TiMax outputs were allocated to provide control room spatial monitoring that matched the spatial placements and movements of content in the actual arena.

A separate networked TiMax client control computer was located at the arena space during rehearsals. Using this computer, Scott Wilsallen and OutBoard’s Robin Whittaker, on-site in Abu Dhabi to assist with TiMax setup and spatial programming, audited and selected the most effective spatial events for hard programming into the show. The consequent TiMax cues were assigned OSC commands to be triggered from the main show playback server.

(Photos: OutBoard)

www.outboard.co.uk

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