Sound Design idea
Hello all,
I'm designing a show coming up in November at the Red Cat theater. It's a collaboration between the music school and the theater school.
Here's the setup:
A trombone player controlls the action. He is on a central platform and the audience is seated around him on all 4 sides. Seated behind the audience members are the other symphony members, 28 people in all. The members of the symphony that he is facing at any given moment will be playing along and improvising with him. The others will not.
Heres the issue:
Since the trombone is a highly directional instrument I would like to give him some reinforcement so that the people behind him and to the side of him can still hear what is going on. But I don't want to kill the people in front of him. A mixer could do this live, ducking the volume to each zone as the trombonist moves around. But I don't know how much he is going to move, if it's scripted, or how quickly he will be moving. So I'd like to have some sort of automation to control the volume of each zone. Plus automation is more fun.
The possible solutions:
1) I could put an infrared transmitter on the end of the trombone and 4 receivers; one placed on the top of each music stand on the 4 sides. Those transmitters would go into a computer midi program called MAX (a program that changes/manipulates/routes midi information so that you can do quite literally anything you can think of). The max patch would spit out midi information into the digital board. The effect being that when the IR sensor receives information from the transmitter it would duck the channel that controls the speaker in that area.
The problem with 1) is that any changes in the lighting could make the IR unstable and duck the area when I didn't want it to.
2) A similar idea except instead of using IR we use microphones and compressors. The trombone will be on mic anyway because it needs to be reinforced. I would use a splitter to send that signal to the B channel on 4 stereo compressors. Then on each music stand I'd have another mic. That mic would go to the A channel in each compressor. I'd then set up the compressor so that only the B channel is output but if the A channel increases both are ducked, thus lowering the speaker of the zone that the trombone is facing.
The problem with 2) is that that's a lot of splitting of the original signal AND that's a lot of compressors.
Does anyone else out there have any other ideas?
I'm designing a show coming up in November at the Red Cat theater. It's a collaboration between the music school and the theater school.
Here's the setup:
A trombone player controlls the action. He is on a central platform and the audience is seated around him on all 4 sides. Seated behind the audience members are the other symphony members, 28 people in all. The members of the symphony that he is facing at any given moment will be playing along and improvising with him. The others will not.
Heres the issue:
Since the trombone is a highly directional instrument I would like to give him some reinforcement so that the people behind him and to the side of him can still hear what is going on. But I don't want to kill the people in front of him. A mixer could do this live, ducking the volume to each zone as the trombonist moves around. But I don't know how much he is going to move, if it's scripted, or how quickly he will be moving. So I'd like to have some sort of automation to control the volume of each zone. Plus automation is more fun.
The possible solutions:
1) I could put an infrared transmitter on the end of the trombone and 4 receivers; one placed on the top of each music stand on the 4 sides. Those transmitters would go into a computer midi program called MAX (a program that changes/manipulates/routes midi information so that you can do quite literally anything you can think of). The max patch would spit out midi information into the digital board. The effect being that when the IR sensor receives information from the transmitter it would duck the channel that controls the speaker in that area.
The problem with 1) is that any changes in the lighting could make the IR unstable and duck the area when I didn't want it to.
2) A similar idea except instead of using IR we use microphones and compressors. The trombone will be on mic anyway because it needs to be reinforced. I would use a splitter to send that signal to the B channel on 4 stereo compressors. Then on each music stand I'd have another mic. That mic would go to the A channel in each compressor. I'd then set up the compressor so that only the B channel is output but if the A channel increases both are ducked, thus lowering the speaker of the zone that the trombone is facing.
The problem with 2) is that that's a lot of splitting of the original signal AND that's a lot of compressors.
Does anyone else out there have any other ideas?