Christopher BarrettPolygon Live is to stage a series of outdoor live shows in London’s Crystal Palace Park featuring an immersive, 360°, sound system.
Among the acts billed to play Polygon Live LDN on 2-5 May are Jon Hopkins, Tinariwen, Gold Panda and Nitin Sawhney.
Presented by spatial audio pioneers Polygon Live, in partnership with Full Fat 360 and OpenLab, Polygon Live LDN will see the world premiere of Polygon’s dual-dome stage design. The company said that each hemispherical structure will be rigged with an 12.1.4 system with 12 L-Acoustics speaker arrays surrounding the audience, a festival-grade sub-wall delivering bass, and four overhead arrays providing sound from above.
Polygon said that with around 100 speakers across each dome, the gigs will involve five times the number of speakers typically used for a stage of its size. The structures will also feature a lattice of LED lighting synchronised with the sound system. The artists will collaborate with Polygon’s spatial sound engineers to tease out the individual components of every track using L-Acoustics’ L-ISA processor. This provides the audience with the impression that the sounds are moving around, above and through the crowd as the artists perform, in order to provide an immersive experience.
“Originally, our deployment of spatial audio emerged from the live sets of electronic music,” said Polygon CEO Nico Elliott. “Live DJs use a number of sounds, textures, frequencies and rhythms, which helped to push our understanding of what’s possible in spatial audio.
“At Polygon Live LDN, our programming has evolved. Working in partnership with renowned curators OpenLab, we’ve brought together an incredible line-up of visionary artists spanning electronic, world, jazz and experimental music to showcase their work in our 360° environment.”