How immersive technology is unwrapping sound at Kings Place

Kings Place, a hub for music and the arts in the newly developed heart of London’s King’s Cross, is this week ramping up to host the 15^th edition of its imaginative Unwrapped series, focusing on this year’s theme, Sound Unwrapped. Kicking off tomorrow evening, the series explores the topic of sound through a programme of music and sound art events running until December 2023. Each event offers audiences and immersive listening experiences made possible by a newly installed d&b Soundscape system in the smaller of the venue’s two halls.

Helen Wallace, the venue’s artistic and executive director, and the brains behind this year’s theme, explained how Sound Unwrapped became the logical next step after Covid restrictions temporarily changed the way the venue ran its performances. ‘Kings Place reopened incredibly quickly after lockdown, but performers and audiences had to be spaced out so much, even in a small venue. It began to make me think about listening in a different way, perhaps putting the audience in the centre of an experience rather than sitting removed from it and being in this two-dimensional relationship with what's on stage.’

This is where d&b Soundscape stepped in. Having already made a name for themselves as the company behind the ‘acoustic shell’ for Aurora Orchestra’s performance at the otherwise sound-dampening London Printworks, the company set up a rig of 19 loudspeakers to allow artists to not only amplify but manipulate sound throughout their performances. The venue will keep the setup for a year, facilitating surround-sound performances throughout the Sound Unwrapped series. Wallace was keen to explore the technology’s creative potential but was aware of the potentially divisive effect of pushing these boundaries. She recalls the venue’s Covid-curtailed Nature Unwrapped series in 2020 when the technology was first introduced. ‘We played the sound of a blue whale, and the hall was vibrating so much I thought the lights were going to shatter. It's extraordinary, but people get quite scared when sounds get that extreme. Many audiences loved it and really gave themselves over to it, but some people had quite a visceral reaction to it.’

d&b Soundscape installed 19 speakers in Kings Place's Hall Two © Hannah Peel

Mercury prize-winner and Kings Place artist in residence Hannah Peel, however, sees the technology’s capacity for inclusion. ‘There’s a different energy to it than when you're just blasted with sound from the front, there’s something very special about that all-encompassing sound, almost like an audio hug. When I’ve used immersive sound technology in the past it felt like I was including and embracing every single person in that audience.’ For herself as a composer and performer, Peel sees a huge amount of potential in the soundscape. ‘It gives you scope as an artist to think outside of the box and feel supported by the technology around you. It’s incredible to programme the show and send sound around and above you and feel like it's moving below you.’ Beyond performance, the soundscape has changed the way Peel builds her compositions. ‘A lot of my music is quite textural and multi-dimensional, so rather than just thinking in flat sound or stereo sound, I'm now always thinking of where sounds are placed and how they can move.

Not all artists get the hang of the technology so easily, says Wallace, who has had to encourage artists to rethink their approach to performance in the venue. ‘I think people do feel excited by it, but they also want guidance. An artist like Liam Byrne, who will be playing some of his album Concrete in the hall, has also created a lot of sound installations, but he's going to have to reconfigure his performance because it's a slightly different technology and it treats sound in different ways.’ Once artists build familiarity with it, Wallace says, they can find greater creative freedom. ‘For classical musicians, I don't think technology is always a threat, it sometimes sets off the sheer ability and power that they can offer.’

For audiences at Kings Place, this freedom takes the form of new and exciting performance experiences. Ligeti Quartet’s May performance of Steve Reich’s Different Trains will push the Soundscape to its limits with strings, speech and sound collage moving independently around the hall, while Laura Cannell takes a more analogue approach to creating a soundscape, with speakers carried on people's backs moving around the audience.

Wallace concedes that these innovative performance experiences often come at a price. With space needed for additional staff and safety concerns to consider, there’s less space and less tickets on offer. However, she feels the cost is worth the pay-off. ‘There are lots of challenges, cost-wise, to doing things that are not standard because the standard concert format optimises your capacities. You don't do that event lightly, you can't just do it every day, you do it because artistically it's going to become a really unforgettable event.’

Kings Place’s unique position as both an arts and a conference venue also raised some barriers for the Soundscape system. ‘We have a very tight schedule because our charity is funded in quite a significant part by our conference business. If you get too much tech in, that doesn't suit some conferences’ aesthetic.’ However, the venue has again embraced innovation with an imaginative solution. ‘The tech team has created a whole separate rig for Soundscape which can be robotically lifted and lowered so a soon as each arts event has finished, it will be raised right up into the ceiling.’

Despite the challenges posed by implementing soundscape technology and spatialised performance techniques, the wheel of innovation has not stopped turning in Kings Place. I asked Peel – is this technology the future? ‘Yes, definitely. I’ve noticed there's been a real surge in musicians’ confidence of presenting classical music in a different way and I think that needs to be echoed in the technology used to present it. At a time when we're getting less people into classical concerts, venues and promoters need to be pushing the boundaries more.’

Wallace agrees. ‘I think it's already happening. Lots of venues across the UK are having these sound systems put in and it's going to begin to seem a bit strange if you don't have the capacity for it.’ However, she’s careful not to overlook the idea which started it all. ‘I feel that it's incredibly important to never lose sight of what acoustic instruments and singers can do. When you're in tight circumstances and you need to be as nimble and agile as possible as an organisation, the sheer power of acoustic spatialized music cannot be understated.’