TheaterWorks Hartford’s immersive production of Circus Fire was staged in the round inside the Governor’s Foot Guard armoury in Hartford. The acoustically challenging venue called for a spatial audio system that could keep dialogue intelligible from any performer position while still supporting large-scale theatrical effects. Sound designer Lindsay Jones specified a TiMax SoundHub spatial audio processor with TiMax TrackerD4 real-time performer stagetracking. Loudspeakers were drawn from Martin Audio’s FlexPoint range, chosen for its compact form factor and coaxial dispersion. Audio was supplied by Brooklyn, NewYork-based adi worldwide.
TiMax was chosen for its flexibility and versatility after Jones and associate sound designer Nat Houle conducted an exhaustive comparison of every available spatial audio platform. “For theatre, the most important thing is being able to hear and understand the actors’ voices,” Jones explained. “Without that, we have no show.” He added, “TiMax is very modular, very flexible. A lot of the other spatial audio programs have fixed parameters not conducive to in-arena staging.” Houle, who programmed the system, confirmed the stakes, “Without microphones on actors in the space, we wouldn’t have been able to hear a huge portion of the show because of the room acoustics.”
Martin Audio’s FlexPoint range was chosen for two reasons. The venue’s historic status demanded floor-standing rigging and therefore lightweight cabinets; Jones also wanted loudspeakers placed unusually close to the audience. His design concept was to, “create an acoustic space below the acoustic space of the room” to deliver clean signal to the ear before the reverberant room could colour it. Two FlexPoint FP4s sat above each of the five audience banks for vocal reinforcement, FP6s provided surrounds, six FP12s in the balcony handled larger effects, and four subwoofers anchored the room. Houle noted, “The magic of the FlexPoint series is that because it’s coaxial, it has a really nice, even drop-off as you start to go off-axis. It’s more forgiving.” Jones was equally impressed with the FP4’s fidelity: “It’s a significantly more high-fidelity speaker than I gave it credit for. I would definitely ask to use them again.”
TiMax delivered a level of transparency the design team had not previously experienced. TiMax TrackerD4 followed each performer while TiMax SoundHub localised the voice, so audio matched the body producing it. “Not only is it important that I can track the actor and know exactly where they are, but with TiMax I can craft exactly how that sounds,” Houle observed. “People felt like the size of their bodies. It felt proportional. That is transparency.” Jones added, “You were always able to hear everything, always aware where it was coming from. It felt very natural.” TiMax’s flexibility also allowed simultaneous scenes to be localised without competing.
Two specific moments showed what the system made possible. In the fire sequences, switchboard operator characters took phone calls with phone-effect processing applied to their voices. Because TiMax was tracking and localising each mic, the processed voice appeared to come from the phone in the actor’s hand, not from the PA. “It literally sounded like their natural voice coming through a phone, restricted to the body of the person,” Houle observed. “It was really magical.” Jones also discovered that musical underscoring could be attached to a performer’s tracker, so a character’s theme physically followed them through the space – a creative freedom he says he will build into every show.
For Jones, the achievement is measured by what audiences do not notice. He concluded, “Anyone seeing the show will have no idea how difficult this room is, because TiMax essentially solved it. It is the most customizable spatial audio software currently available for live audio. I’m excited to see what else I can do with it.”
This sentiment is backed up by Jared Mezzocchi – director of the show, and the creative fire behind what he calls a ‘multimedia experience’. He affirmed, “The combined package of TiMax SoundHub and TiMax TrackerD4 was a subtle, nuanced, necessary tool that let the story and storyteller remain foregrounded by eliminating all of the hurdles a reverberant armoury presents.”
“I’ve never been able to point at a technology so confidently to say, ‘This is technology serving the theatrical story.’ It’s not lipstick on top of story, it’s an embedded tool for story. TiMax, to me, was a member of the ensemble. It made the show.”
