Starlight Express | October 2018 | LSi

THEATRE

Starlight Express

Photo: Jens Hauer (Starlight Express)

Opened in 1988, the Starlighthalle, now known as the Starlight Express Theatre, was built to house a permanent production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s hit musical. The production has played ever since, being seen by over 16 million people. To mark this year’s 30th anniversary, Starlight Express was given a major overhaul. Lloyd Webber created new songs, committed out-ofdate characters to the scrapyard and generally put the show on 21st century tracks. The smoking carriage was stubbed out and new female characters were introduced to redress the original show’s male dominance. The overhaul also included a technically ground-breaking new sound design.

SOUND DECISIONS Lloyd Webber, having been impressed by the sound design for Bat Out of Hell (see LSi June), pointed Really Useful Group in the direction of multi award-winning British sound designer Gareth Owen. After completing a workshop with the Starlight Express creative team, Owen, along with associate sound designer Russell Godwin and production engineer Andy Green, embarked upon Bochum’s Starlight Express.

Faced with the task of a complete new sound design, Owen began to think about trying something entirely new. “I’d been involved with d&b in the development of Soundscape for a long time,” he explains. “Steve Jones at d&b and I had been talking about it a lot, and I’d been to Germany on several occasions to hear demos. I had reservations, of course: changing to a completely new, revolutionary design when you already know how to do it the old way was quite daunting. But I felt I needed something that would make it stand out.”

Visiting the Starlight Express Theatre, Owen was convinced. “I thought, this is the perfect space for Soundscape. So I phoned

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Steve and he came out to the theatre, and agreed. Then we sat down with Russell and Andy and worked out the practicalities.

We spent a lot of time with 3D renderings and CAD drawings, making sure that we could get everything where we needed it, and that it wasn’t going to get in the way of lighting and projection. Eventually, we decided to bite the bullet.”

Jones says: “Soundscape will sound better than a left/right system, even without the movement of sounds. In a lot of theatre shows we don’t use much movement anyway, so I was really confident that even with just the ability to place sound objects and separate them, Soundscape would add so much to this show that it was worthwhile taking that step.”

DESIGN THINKING Owen was well aware he’d bitten off rather a large mouthful with his decision to use d&b’s latest innovation. A powerful, object-based mixing system which offers results far beyond those achievable with traditional left/right stereo PA systems, Soundscape also makes different technical demands and requires new ways of thinking about sound. What’s more, it’s a system that is still at the beginning of an on-going development in terms of its user interface, software tools and application experience.

For sound designers, the platform offers a new magnitude of creative possibilities compared to the traditional left/right stereo system. In Soundscape, sound ‘objects’ can be independently positioned: sources can be placed precisely where the eye tells the brain they should be, or creatively manipulated for effects. Most importantly, the chosen sound image is consistent across the audience area, not only for those fortunate enough to be in that mid-line sweet-spot between left and right arrays.

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LSi pulls into Bochum’s Starlight Express Theatre to discover how d&b Soundscape has rejuvenated the hit musical 30 years on . . .

Photo: Detlef Hoepfner

“Soundscape allowed me to create different types of bands,” says Owen. “For example, there’s a quite intimate number, like a little pub band; for that, I grouped all the drums together in one place, then took the guitars and the bass and spread them around and kind of ‘drew’ a little pub band on the screen. It sounds like you’re hearing the groups of instruments together.

“For the bigger rock numbers, I moved the overhead objects hard left and hard right; spread my toms across the stereo field and so on, for a big, well-spread sound. Then, for one of the more electronic numbers, I spread everything around the surround field, so that everything was coming from all over the place. After a while, we started animating those objects as well, so we would have guitars swirling around the audience, and wrapping it all up in reverb. That was a lot of fun.”

Soundscape also changes the way designers think about sound effects, says Owen: “Traditionally I’ve treated sound effects as channels of audio; I’ve sent sound effects to various channels depending on where I wanted them to come from and what I wanted them to do. Mixing and creating sound effects in Soundscape, you don’t send things to channels - you send things to objects and then you place those objects where you want them. That was a departure for me. Once I got used to it, it gave me a lot more power.”

Owen also took opportunities to add extra dynamics. “Because in Starlight Express the cast are racing around the room, we did some moments where we tracked the position of the performer as they moved around the track and had the vocal follow them.

The only problem is that we’re not using a tracking system, so if the cast go a little bit faster or slower, they can get out of sync with the voice. Because this was our first foray into Soundscape,

we didn’t feel confident using the tracking data, but I think we will seriously consider it in the future.”

CHALLENGES & OPPORTUNITIES Owen and his team knew that with the first iteration of the Soundscape platform, still in the early stages of development for theatre sound applications, there would be challenges. He explains: “One of the elements that isn’t complete in Soundscape yet is the handling of snapshots or crossfading of objects from one place to another. It also doesn’t have any sort of pattern generation for things like moving a sound around in a circle.”

Jones adds: “We’re very early in Soundscape’s development.

We’ve got the tool to realise a completely new way of hearing sound - that’s fantastic - but we’re not there yet on giving all the controls to allow people to make fast decisions and implement changes quickly in a theatre tech rehearsal scenario.” He adds: “Because we’ve incorporated the OSC protocol, it’s possible for theatre guys with programming skills to take OSC and create their own control platforms. That’s not going to work immediately for the masses, but it does allow Gareth to be a significant early adopter and to push the boundaries of sound design.”

While d&b is developing such functionality, Owen and his team took the leap - with d&b’s support - of developing their own custom control software. “My secret weapon was Russell, my senior associate, who’s an accomplished programmer,” says Owen. “He spent a month or so writing a snapshot manager programme for Soundscape. That gave us the ability not only to store the location or object wherever we placed them and recall them on a scene-by-scene basis, but also to crossfade between positions, and do that on a snapshot, scene-by-scene basis.

He also wrote a pattern generation programme that allowed us WWW.LSIONLINE.COM • OCTOBER 2018

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Photo: Detlef Hoepfner

Photo: Detlef Hoepfner

B From top: Multiple hangs above the front of stage form part of the configuration . . .

to spin vocals around the room, move things backwards and forwards and pan left to right, around in circles, which allowed us to do some of the cool effects that we’ve got going on in Starlight Express.”

Development continues, of course, and according to d&b, future iterations of Soundscape will offer functionality of this kind, and more. “Soundscape is new for us still, it’s even more new for the users,” explains Jones. “But as we’re learning, we’re making tools that make the process easier. This was not a simple system, remember: it’s the biggest Soundscape installation to date. It’s a lot of work to begin with but then, when you can simply grab an object and move it, and it takes three seconds and works - there’s a balance there.”

SYSTEM HARDWARE Soundscape depends, in its simplest 180˚ format, on multiple small hangs of loudspeakers above the front of the stage hence Owen’s reference to consulting with the lighting and projection departments. Starlight Express was to be a full 360˚ implementation.

E . . . visible in full digitally via the Soundscape software

C Gareth Owen, sound designer

Photo: Detlef Hoepfner

“The main issue is that we have to dominate the top front edge of the stage almost entirely,” says Owen. “The truss above the stage has seven hangs of line array and six hangs of subwoofer, so it completely takes over a very key position. We were very lucky that the lighting designer, Rob Sinclair, and the projection designer, Duncan McLean, were so open to working around us.”

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While Owen initially wanted to use hangs of seven V-Series cabinets along the front truss, Jones advised that the smaller Y-Series would be ample. d&b ArrayCalc and EASE modelling demonstrated that hangs of eight boxes were needed as a minimum to achieve the required front-to-back vertical coverage, so to preserve sightlines as far as possible, Y-Series was specified. “Kind of begrudgingly, I agreed to use Y-Series, and actually it was great,” admits Owen. “We’ve got seven hangs of eight boxes of Y, and it’s all working absolutely beautifully.”

“It’s not a miracle fix system. But what Soundscape has done is given us consistent, really good sound, for 90% of the audience.

I ended up being very, very happy with the result . . .”

- Gareth Owen Widening the front image further are three d&b V10P cabinets per side. These “expansion speakers” provide more pan and width to the Soundscape. Close to the stage, where full coverage from the main system is unachievable, two Y7P cabinets per side serve as front-fills. A row of 16 d&b D6 delays cover the rear rows beneath the balcony, while eight further Y7Ps point at the upper gallery area. Completing the full 360˚ Soundscape implementation are 32 d&b Y10P cabinets spaced around the room’s perimeter.

Sennheiser’s latest version of the 6000 Digital, with Dante output card, is the wireless system of choice and is used in conjunction with the latest advance from DPA Microphones, the new DPA 4061 with Core amplifier technology. This combination has worked “extremely well,” according to Owen.

A long-term Avid user, Owen chose the Avid S6L console as his FOH mixing desk, which he integrates directly with the d&b DS100 signal engine, the processor at the

core of Soundscape, via the OSC plugin for Avid. This enables the positioning of objects via the desk, although the team is also extensively using mouse and touchscreen operation to drag objects around within the d&b R1 remote control software.

The system design also includes a back-up DS100 signal processor. “We’re running two DS100s in dual redundant mode,” explains Owen. “We’re using the Autograph Dante changeover box,

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Sound waves Wavetool, the audio monitoring solution used for Starlight Express’ revival, has been making a splash at major productions this summer. Gareth Owens details the ins and outs of the software . . .

“Starlight is currently the world’s largest Soundscape installation; in short, a revolution for the audience experience,” says Owen.

“But it’s important when you engage with new technology that you don’t lose touch with the fundamentals - in particular, the need to maintain an entirely reliable platform for the performance. Which is why I’m so fond of Wavetool. It might appear simple, but on a dayto-day basis, Wavetool is integrated into everything we do. It has moved radio mic technology into the 21st century.”

To illustrate his point, Owen referred to two productions: Summer, the biographical musical about the career of Donna Summer playing on Broadway, and Bat Out of Hell The Musical, a production based on Meat Loaf’s 1977 record (see LSi June 2018) in the West End. “These shows are founded on the modern pop vernacular and sometimes quite loud. As such, they require precise attention to the performers’ microphones.”

and running 64 streams of Dante into both units, then taking the 64 streams out of both and running them into the switch, so we actually have a main and back-up DS100. It’s also worth pointing out we didn’t have to touch it once - at absolutely no point did it even hiccup.”

LATE REFLECTIONS Asked how far he felt he had exploited the possibilities of the new platform, Owen says: “With d&b En-Scene, the object-based sound positioning software within Soundscape, we explored it pretty fully. It’s a new product, and there’s a long way to go before it’s a universal tool, but d&b are very clear that this is version one - and you know they’re dedicated to developing this well into the future.”

The other software element within Soundscape is d&b En-Space, which allows the application of room emulation reverb signatures. “I didn’t really explore En-Space,” says Owen.

“I spend so much of my time in musical theatre trying to reduce reverberations and get things tighter and crisper that having a global reverb over the top of it all I didn’t find constructive.

And really, it’s about providing an overall ambience rather than special effects. In a musical like Starlight Express, when we’re creating reverb, we’re creating it as an effect. But for a different show, in a different theatre, I am absolutely looking forward to playing with it.”

As to his view of Soundscape and its implications for theatre sound, Owen says: “It’s not a miracle fix system. But what Soundscape has done is given us consistent, really good sound, for 90% of the audience. I ended up being very, very happy with the result at Starlight Express - so did my client, and so did everybody with experience of the show. It has delivered much more consistent sound throughout the space than I think I could ever have achieved with a traditional system - and I’m very happy with that.”

Jones adds: “There are several shows in the US using Soundscape and we’re learning a lot from those. Over here, there are two shows that we’ve learned a lot from: one is Starlight Express, which has been a massive confidence boost and has shown just what we can achieve, and what there is still to achieve. At the same time, Seb Frost used Soundscape on his

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“With Bat, the biggest challenge is finding the balance between rock and roll and musical theatre. The songs are designed to be played loudly - Jim Steinman writes good, ‘balls-to-the-wall’ rock. That said, the essential ingredient of musical theatre is you have to be able to hear every word - the lyrics must be allowed to tell the story. So, the balance question is between what works musically through volume, and what works theatrically.” As Owen was quick to point out, the Bat audience tends to be an even mix of fans of musical theatre and album lovers, who may have never been to theatre before. “The former doesn’t want to be blasted, the latter does,” he notes.

Danny Pearson, Owen’s sound number two, adds: “One of the main challenges at Bat is achieving vocal clarity, given the 12-piece band, the rock’n’roll nature of the show, and the use of miniature head-worn microphones. Therefore it’s crucial that these mics are always in the best possible position on the actor and that’s despite complex, energetic choreography and multiple costume changes. Wavetool allows us to monitor the quality of these mics throughout the show and judge whether or not there is a problem. With 44 radio mics in use, the clear and accurate Wavetool interface easily allows us to spot problems before they affect the show. The fact that we can see an overview of audio level and RF level over the past 10 seconds for every receiver has proved to be incredibly useful.”

Summer bears comparison, but its disco roots impose other strictures. “Like Bat, it’s all mixed in surround sound, and the big challenge is vocal headroom,” says Owen. “The other issue is mic positioning; our director, Des McAnuff (he did The Who’s Tommy, and Jersey Boys, arguably the most successful jukebox musical of all time) is not a fan of typical boom mics like the [DPA] 4066; yet this is a show powered by a d&b J-Series with J subs and J-Infras peaks of 111dBA are not uncommon - so using only head-worn mics was a huge challenge. This was where Wavetool really came into its own. Jordano Abrenica, my number two, was able to scrupulously ensure every mic position was precisely the same every night and through every change, so the really tight EQ we had done for each to get maximum headroom could be achieved with consistency.”

Owen concludes: “There’s not a lot I can tell you about Wavetool other than we use it on everything. Everybody really likes it, the tech’ support is excellent, and everyone likes [CEO] Timo Liski.”

P //wavetool.fi

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design for Sting’s musical, The Last Ship, and we learned a huge amount there about touring the system through venues.

Those two shows have been instrumental for d&b and our work with Soundscape in theatre.”

Jones observes: “The old rules about sound system design said that you use as few speakers as possible, with as narrow dispersion as possible, and you point them in as few directions as possible, so that you excite the audience and not the room. Now, we’re using wide dispersions speakers, we’re putting loads of them in and we’re pointing them everywhere and it sounds more intelligible than anything we did before. It’s crazy, but it’s working. The rulebook is being torn up and we’re just in the process of putting it back together.”

CREDIT WHERE IT’S DUE . . .

A side benefit of revolutionary technology is to highlight the skill of those who worked without it. “Something I consistently thought about while working on this show was what an absolute genius Martin Levan was to get this working originally,” says Owen. “It’s so complicated; when you look at what he did back then, it’s jaw-dropping.”

Owen knows how it’s done today, and the essential role played by his team.

He says: “When I first said to Russell and Andy that we’re doing something totally different on our first big show for Andrew Lloyd Webber, they did look at me like I was nuts. But to their credit, they supported me and made it work.

And Phil Hurley and his team at Stage Sound Services, who supplied the show, did a brilliant job. They supplied the initial Really Useful Group workshop and looked after us so well that we all said, well, why would we talk to anyone else?”

Finally, to underline his satisfaction with Soundscape, Owen says: “I always invite the cast into the auditorium to listen, usually to the overture of the show.

Usually I sit them somewhere I know the sound’s good, but this time I made a point of saying they could walk around the theatre, and listen from anywhere they liked - knowing what a great job Soundscape does and knowing how the design was delivering consistency around the space.”

Their reaction? “There were tears,” says Owen. “Personally, I didn’t think it was that bad.” I

“Traditionally I’ve treated sound effects as channels of audio . . . Mixing and creating sound effects in Soundscape, you don’t send things to channels - you send things to objects and then you place those objects where you want them . . .”

- Gareth Owen

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