The exploration into immersive sound for BIG began with a connection to d&b audiotechnik, who introduced them to their Soundscape system and its ability to place audio objects in a space. “From the beginning, we decided sound would play a really important role in our exhibition,” says Alfonso Losco, Technical Director at BIG. “When we started working with Sasha, he suggested collaborating with Sonosphere as they have expertise in producing electronic music and would be able to give us what we needed to make the soundtrack immersive, as our goal was to have powerful music that envelops the visitor and makes them feel ‘inside’ the experience.”

The audio was split into two distinct areas: music and sound effects. The sound effects were supplied by Klangerfinder in Berlin to be triggered when visitors interacted with the content on the video walls. The content, delivered by disguise video servers, utilised laser scanners to know when people were interacting with the content and then issued OSC commands to a QLab system, which then fired the appropriate spot effect. The same OSC data that fired the effect also informed the d&b Soundscape system where the effect was to be located, with automatic panning to localise each specific effect.

“The music track for the show and any linear sound effects that always happened in the same place were all delivered by Sasha to Sonosphere as a set of stereo stems of each section of the hour-long work,” explains Sonosphere’s Technical Director and Senior Mix Engineer, Phil Wright. “In total, we had around 400 stereo stems to provide enough granularity to do a really effective spatialisation. I chose to work in Atmos because the Soundscape system already had 40 of its 64 inputs taken up with spot effects, and with the number of stems we had, and the amount of automation we wanted to use, 20 or so objects in Soundscape was not going to be enough. So, we made those 20 inputs standard matrixes on the DS100 and then utilised Atmos rendering in 20.0 to output to those loudspeaker positions. Once this was all programmed and configured in the Dolby RMU, we took it it to site.”

Although Sonosphere and Sasha did much of the pre-production work at Sonosphere’s Dolby Atmos studio at Metropolis Studio in London, with a number of last-minute changes to the running order and runtime of the piece, they decided to take an RMU to Berlin and finish the work in situ. Wright also tweaked the Soundscape system to account for the challenging acoustic of the large industrial unit, changing the position of some subwoofers and the infra sub for chest-thumping electronic moments and nuanced classical elements.

“Duncan [Bell, Sonosphere Commercial Director], Jamie [Gosney, Sonosphere Creative Director] and of course Phil, really put our minds at rest when it came to being able to transfer what we were doing in the studio to the venue space,” says DJ Sasha’s studio partner, David Gardner. “Having Phil with us in Berlin was amazing, he understood the music and how to make the most of it in the space.”

“It was incredible to see what the team achieved in the first two days; calibrating, adjusting and positioning all 22 channels around the space,” adds Alfonso. “Whilst our studio created powerful visuals, connecting our work with Sonosphere’s treatement and spatialisation of Sasha’s music offered a unique experience that just exploded with the Soundscape system. We’ve had people who are involved in music production at the exhibition, and they said it was a really immersive experience. It’s not only what you see; if you close your eyes, you can feel the objects around you. It’s like you’re going inside them.”

Genius is BIG’s first interactive exhibition. It is pushing boundaries by combining immersive sound with interactive visuals on the walls and reactivity on the floor, and at different resolutions. As part of the interactive exhibition, there’s a cube in the centre of the room that’s also filled with sound. “I describe that as not a 360 sound but 720, because it’s coming from outside to inside and inside to outside,” Alfonso notes.

Genius has proven a resounding success, so much so that its six-month tenancy in Berlin is being extended and there are plans to take it on tour to other cities around the world.

“The effort from everyone involved, Sonosphere and d&b for the audio, Panasonic who were instrumental for the video projection, and our technical implementors, including Klangerfinder in Berlin, has been phenomenal,” concludes Alfonso. “Thank you to everyone involved. We have created a phenomenal show, now we will make it even bigger!”

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Having worked under the radar for many years, with the Kingdom’s project 2030 now well underway and with music playing an integral part, BluePaper produced five tracks for his EP that form a unique fusion of Middle East and western-style electronica, that is both evocative and emotive.

In November 2021, Matthew Dicks, Executive Director Music & Talent at global music and new media platform, MDLBEAST, and producers of the epic MDLBEAST Soundstorm Festival held in Riyadh, approached Sonosphere to work on BluePaper’s project.

“He wanted to get the tracks mixed in Dolby Atmos and sent them to us with the proviso that there might need to be more content added,” says Sonosphere Director, Jamie Gosney. “But when Phil Wright, our Senior Mix Engineer, heard them, he said they were amazing. We decided to go over the top with the spatialisation, using the movement processor within the Atmos spatialisation suite to create the space the music deserves.”

Phil asked Jamie to listen to the spatialised tracks before they invited Matthew to hear them. From the opening of the first track, Riyadh at Twilight, he was transfixed. “I was transported in my imagination to the bazars of Marrakech, which as it turned out, was exactly BluePaper’s intention,” he says. “It was so beautiful and so moving, tears rolled down my cheeks.”

Matthew was then invited to Sonosphere’s 3D studio in Metropolis Studios. He was blown away. “BluePaper’s music is a wonderful example of the enchanting and romantic Arabic instrumentation with a hypnotic house beat, a perfect example of musical and cultural fusion that is the foundation of WTR and MDLBEAST Records,” he says. “As a start-up label, we are open to innovation in distribution, performance and formats, and a visit to the Sonosphere studio was really inspiring.”

BluePaper happened to be travelling to the UK and went to the studio to hear what the Sonosphere team had done. “At first, he sat there with his head in his hands. We thought, ‘Oh no, he hates them!’” Jamie recalls. “But he looked up after the first track and there was a tear in his eye. He said, ‘I just can’t ever go back to stereo’.”

Taking the elements of each track out of the norm of a standard stereo mix and reproducing them in Dolby Atmos, allows the listener to hear the nuances in each track, transporting them to far flung places. And whilst the ability to listen to spatial audio is not yet ubiquitous, Wright notes that the advantage to creating a Dolby Atmos mix is that stereo version it renders down to is still better than the originally stereo mastered version. “This is because of the way the Dolby processor works,” Phil explains. “It takes care of all the out of phase information, taking the spatialisation and doing a similar thing with just two speakers.”

“It was such a privilege to work with an artist and producer who has been working in the background for many years and is now able to bring his music to the world,” concludes Jamie. “Everyone needs to hear this amazing artist.”

To hear BluePaper’s unique new compositions, listen to the Elephant Rock EP here.

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Over the last two years, nine heavyweight organisations –Audiotonix, Brighton Dome & Brighton Festival, LiveFrom, Mativision, Metropolis Studios, Sonosphere, Virgin Media O2, and Warner Music Group – have worked collectively with Digital Catapult, the UK authority on advanced digital technology, to explore the untapped potential of 5G for the live music industry and provide a blueprint for how technology could play a key role in the future of the sector as part of the wider £200m DCMS 5G Testbeds & Trials Programme.

This ground-breaking festival experience was held to celebrate the climax of the award-winning 5G Festival project. It showcased the technical achievements made during the project and demonstrated the potential role advanced digital technologies could play in the festival of the future.

Headliners included double-platinum album selling singer-songwriter Newton Faulkner and Brighton-based Alt Folk band Memorial, both playing in Brighton Dome’s iconic Concert Hall to an in-person audience. Rising stars, BRIT Award nominee and voice of the 2021 John Lewis Christmas Ad, Lola Young, and Natalie Lindi, part of the MOBO Unsung Class of 2021, performed live in the O2 Blueroom at The O2. They were joined by seamless backing vocals, drums and keyboard from Brighton Dome, and guitar and percussion live from Metropolis Studios in West London. London-based rock duo Pearl Harts did a stand-alone performance at Metropolis Studios, which was live streamed to the other venues as part of the hybrid festival experience.

Sonosphere was responsible for leading all the trials for the entire project, which started back in March 2020 and were headed up by renowned monitor engineer, Andy ‘Baggy’ Robinson. Over the course of the project, tests were carried out to see how much latency three musicians in remote spaces could tolerate. Those results became the benchmark for further trials and ultimately the showcase. Duncan Bell, who joined Sonosphere as a director in October 2021, managed the Sonosphere team in the lead up to the showcase.

“This is one of the most exciting projects I have ever been fortunate enough to have taken part in,” says Sonosphere Director, Jamie Gosney. “In June 2021, we had six musicians playing across three venues. Standing in the middle of the Concert Hall at Brighton Dome and hearing these musicians, who were 60 miles apart, play together like they were in the same room was a very moving experience and one I will never forget.”

For the showcase itself, Sonosphere created a 7.1 mix for the in-venue stream in the Founders Room at Brighton Dome, the live audio in Brighton Dome Concert Hall and the O2 Blueroom, and a binaural feed for the live stream for people watching on their mobile devices at home. It also supplied a binaural stream for a 5G equipped electric bus, which travelled from Metropolis Studios to The O2 the previous day.

Sonosphere’s Senior Mix Engineer, Phil Wright, was responsible the live stream audio, taking 200 channels of audio from the 21 musicians spread across the three venues into Sonosphere’s 3D studio at Metropolis Studios, mixing and spatialising the audio in the studio and then sending it back out to people watching the live streams and for the remote venue streams.

Sonosphere worked closely with d&b audiotechnik to design live immersive audio systems for Brighton Dome Concert Hall, the Founders Room and the Blueroom at The O2. d&b’s Jack Page oversaw the FOH sound in the Concert Hall, while Sonosphere’s Pete Fletcher was responsible for the remote sound at Metropolis Studios, with Colin Walker working across all three venues and on the bus.

“At the beginning of the project, we weren’t sure this could be done; people had tried in the past with unacceptable levels of latency,” says Sonosphere Director Jamie Gosney. “However, working with Audiotonix who brought their incredible audio networking skills to the fore, along with 5G experts at Digital Catapult, we finally got the latency down to an 8ms round trip from venue to venue. That’s quite astonishing! I believe, as a team, we have achieved something truly ground-breaking and potentially world changing. I am so proud that Sonosphere has played a small part in this amazing project.”

As this chapter of the project draws to a close, Sonosphere is still in close contact with the rest of the technical partners from the project and is set to take what they have achieved, build on it and create a viable product to connect artists and audiences around the world.

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