d&b Soundscape at the Frankfurt Opera. Creative sound concepts to combat challenging times
The Frankfurt Opera in Germany is one of the most renowned opera stages in Europe, having paved the way for many successful operatic careers. Recently, with an extensive d&b audio system already in house, the venue chose to enrich its equipment with d&b Soundscape technology.
A d&b DS100 Signal engine was duly purchased in time for the 2019/2020 season and the staging of a world premiere at the Bockenheimer Depot - Frankfurt Opera’s second venue. "It was a spatially complex work,” explains sound engineer, Margit Baruschka, “with moving actors and an orchestra spread across the stage. But, due to the pandemic it has been postponed to 2021.”
The decision was then made to move the entire Soundscape system to the Frankfurt Opera. Here it could be used to adapt some of the regular program to allow for social distancing rules.
Head of Sound, Christian Wilde describes how.
The explicit aim was to let the orchestra sound as realistic as possible – something Baruschka values highly. But with large amounts of scenery onstage, very little direct sound could be heard from the musicians playing backstage, presenting something of a challenge for the sound engineers. "The premise is that you shouldn't hear our work,” she says. “Ideally, the audience don’t even notice the electroacoustic support at all.”
To achieve this perfect ‘illusion’ for the audience, the venue opted to place loudspeakers in the orchestra pit. “We set up a whole battery of loudspeakers in the pit in order to let the main audio emanate from there,” explains Wilde. “For Opera, it is simply not acceptable for sound to solely come from above the portal.”
The team’s first experience with Soundscape has left them delighted and looking to a future with the new technology onboard.
For Wilde the wider benefits are also clear. “With conventional sound reinforcement, listeners who do not sit in the middle of the row will always perceive individual signals as coming more from the left or right, which makes it harder to be fully immersed in the music. Soundscape enables us to stabilize the sound image over the visible width of the portal opening - even if there are no loudspeakers in that exact location.
