Greg discusses the compositional advantages of working with different audio configurations.
Music in the Constellation: An In-Person Immersive Audio Experience, The Future Is… Festival June 11th, 2022 at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, NY
The Future Is…
The Future Is… festival at National Sawdust is coming THIS June and features an immersive audio concert I’ve been creating since 2019.
Tickets are available here.
Maxing Out the System at Sawdust
Well, we did it. We fully maxed out all the addressable channels in Sawdust’s custom Spacemap® system.
So many cables… but after some incredibly helpful support from folks who built this custom system…
The hall sang songs of pure joy. It was glorious!
Music in the Constellation: An Evening of Immersive Audio
Composer Greg Wilder curates an evening of contemporary music from 1 to the 102 speakers that make up the Meyer Sound Constellation at National Sawdust. Featuring seminal works by Frank Zappa and Karlheinz Stockhausen in their original format, the evening explores immersive audio and the creative opportunities it affords in a way that can only experienced first hand in the space itself.
Setting Up A New Play
Setting up for Food & Shelter – a ghost story for those who sometimes wonder if they themselves might be ghosts… A darkly moving fairytale about love. 💜🖤💜
Music was released in Feb 2022. Click Here to listen!
A Dome in the Woods
It seems a wood elf came in the night and installed a 7.1.4 Atmos system in the cabin. Just in time, too. So many multi-channel projects slated for 2022…
Maybe 12 speakers is too many for any one person to handle?
Meyer Sound and National Sawdust Partnership
This week Meyer Sound and National Sawdust announced a new partnership.
We’re talkin’ 86 high-resolution speakers and 16 subwoofers installed behind all of these beautiful wall and ceiling panels. I was fortunate to get a behind-the-scenes look at this amazing setup last month.
This is truly a one-of-a-kind performance space in NYC and some exciting things are in the works. Stay tuned…
George Crumb’s 90th at Sawdust
George Crumb’s 90th birthday celebration concert took place this evening at National Sawdust in Brooklyn. His 90th birthday — can you believe it?
I was invited to view the premiere of a short documentary, experience the concert, and get introduced to their brand new Meyer Sound Constellation audio system.
Believe it or not, there are 102 magical speakers (86 full range + 16 subs) hiding behind those gorgeous wall and ceiling panels. Each one of them has me dreaming of possibilities…
The concert was a STUNNING success.
(I’ve been asked to mix and master the concert audio for the upcoming archival videos and I’ll update this post with links as soon as they’re available online.)
4 Channels Wide
The last three weeks I spent in Florida working with a 10-speaker dome configuration were invaluable. But for reasons both musical and practical, I won’t be adopting the dome in my current workflow.
Some of my requirements that prohibit use of the dome include:
- ease in travel and setup
- flexibility in performance
- sharing and distribution (i.e. web playback)
But most of all, the dome seems best suited to aesthetically-focused acousmatic music. By contrast, the music I create relies heavily on creating the illusion of real acoustic instruments and is otherwise rooted in a traditional, performance-based musical heritage.
That said, the dome has inspired a few important changes to my studio. Specifically, I’ve expanded the available stereo image with two additional speakers placed roughly at three and nine o’clock.
I suspect that a more detailed multi-channel image originating from the concert stage can overcome the aforementioned obstacles while providing the desired benefits. So far, my studio experiments have been very promising, but I’ll need to develop some repertoire and try it out in real performance spaces to know for sure…