From the cinema to the home to your earbuds, spatial audio has made immersive 360-degree sound accessible to almost everybody, in almost any environment. And now that includes live performances.
David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s Here Lies Love, a biographical musical about Filipino politician Imelda Marcos, opened on Broadway and features a form of spatial audio designed to follow the actors as they move around on a massive stage. That area is also filled with audience members, and the show is as much a three-ring circus as it is a Broadway show. I was on the floor for one of the final previews of this startling production, and it gave me an idea of how this audio technology could translate to your home.
Spatial but in real time
Immersive technology is in vogue right now, from the promise of AR and VR to physical experiences such as Meow Wolf. When it comes to Here Lies Love, what makes this production immersive is literally something you can’t see: the sound design. This musical seamlessly uses spatial audio to help envelop you in its world.
Whether it’s Netflix and Amazon Prime Video or Apple Music and Tidal, streaming has brought spatial audio to the masses. It’s portable and convenient, but it involves a fair bit of effort to get to our ears. In terms of movies, Dolby Atmos mixes are performed on a sound stage for use in a cinema and at home, while spatial music involves painstaking remixes of existing albums. But how does this translate to a live performance on stage?
French company L-Acoustics specializes in live sound, and its technology has been used in stage productions for artists such as Adele and Bon Iver, as well as in the studio. The company’s take on spatial audio, the free-to-download L-ISA tool, enables users to move audio objects around a sound field in real-time. In the case of Here Lies Love, the production’s engineers said they “lost count at 150” voices, using a combination of live surround mixing and automation.