L-Acoustics Syva provides musical accompaniment for First Nations spectacular

Australia:

The Adelaide Fringe festival, held in McLaren Vale, debuted the world’s first feature-length drone art display, Sky Song, presenting stories and music from Australia’s First Nations indigenous people. The festival’s production partners, L-Acoustics certified rental partner Novatech, supplied an audio system for a large lawn where 6,000 people could come with picnics to enjoy the visual spectacle.

First Nations stories projected onto a 72m wide, 15m tall holographic screen were extended via drones in the sky operated by UK company, Celestial and fitted with an individual LED light to echo the indigenous dot art style. The main challenge for Novatech was to design a system that would cover the audience area without obstructing the visual elements.

The show’s soundtrack – a mix of speech, poetry, and music – were produced in the preproduction phase, with visual elements then designed to match. The sound system needed to reproduce speech clarity as well as provide sufficient SPL for music such as the bottom-end heavy finale track by Aboriginal Australian electronic music artist, Electric Fields.

“With this project’s unique challenges, Syva was the logical choice,” explained Michael Roberts, account project manager at Novatech. “We needed even coverage, exceptional quality and the lowest possible visual impact to ensure clean sightlines. Syva’s wide dispersion angle also allowed us to have fewer delays to cover the width of the site.”

The Novatech team worked on a system design internally using Soundvision 3D mapping software. “I think they were expecting us to propose a much larger system with more elements, so our design was initially met with considerable scepticism,” Roberts continued. “However, I was confident with Syva and our calculations in Soundvision.” Novatech also used Soundvision to plan out the best spacing and height of the delay system.

The deployment consisted of five sets of Syva and Syva Low mounted on an SB28 subwoofer across the front of the audience area. Two delay lines consisted of three single Syva cabinets rigged on Novatech’s custom mounting stands, with the top of each Syva about 3m high. The system was driven by L-Acoustics LA4 and LA8 amplified controllers, and Novatech’s sound technician Marco Rab aligned and tuned the system.

“There was a sense of excitement across the collaborative production teams on whether Novatech could deliver a system with minimal impact to the ground-based projection,” said Roberts. “Fast forward to the first dress rehearsal; everyone was impressed with the system’s quality of sound and even coverage.

“I was personally ecstatic with the results. The clients’ expectation was a world-class, high-quality sound experience, and we absolutely provided that. The system had headroom to spare, the coverage was spot on and the visual impact to the audience was kept to a minimum with the low-profile design of Syva. Everyone involved in the production had a great experience, and we received plenty of positive comments about the sound system from attendees.”