Barco

 

Every summer since 2012, the German city of Weimar becomes a meeting point for digital avant-garde artists, culture enthusiasts and scientists. During the Genius Loci Weimar festival, they inspire and get inspired by astounding audiovisual art and interactive facade projections. This year’s edition, from 12 to 14 August, may well fascinate them more than ever, as it will feature a truly unique acoustic installation, powered by Barco’s IOSONO immersive audio solution.

Cultural Sounds
The place to experience the acoustic magic is the Hafiz-Goethe-Memorial at Beethoven square. Here, the encounter between the great poets Goethe (Germany) and Hafiz (Iran) is depicted by two granite chairs that face each other, aligned east to west. To reunite the two chairs would be to restore the original block of granite, representing a uniting of East and West.

The festival jury chose ‘Cultural Sounds’, a sound installation by students at the University of Weimar (Martin Recker and Paul Hauptmeier) to translate the ‘East-West’ idea of the Hafiz-Goethe-Memorial. Their audio art includes field recordings from Germany and the Arab world, human voices, as well as processed instrumental recordings and abstract sound objects which they assemble in acoustic spaces reflecting and disassembling stereotypes. Barco Audio Technologies was the ideal partner to lift the soundscapes to a hyper-realistic level, using the IOSONO CORE spatial audio processor.

Customized system
“With our IOSONO CORE, sounds can be freely placed and moved in space with unparalleled precision and robustness, resulting in a crystal-clear perception of sound and great artistic freedom,” explains Stephan Mauer, Strategic Marketing Manager at Barco Audio Technologies. “Moreover, our solutions are scalable: we can drive any reasonable speaker arrangement and then adapt the install to the customer requirements. In Weimar, two walls standing opposite each other are equipped with 20 conventional loudspeakers each. In this way, we found a design that mimics the setting of the monument and is very accessible: everyone can walk inside and around the walls, to experience the space and really get immersed by the sound.”

Performance in space
„The sophistication and sheer number of possibilities for spatializing sound provided by the IOSONO system enable completely new ways of musical expression in our work, e.g. the control and unheard precision of positioning sounds in the vertical domain is literally adding another dimension to immersive sound design. Furthermore, the production support we’re getting from Barco Audio Technologies is extremely helpful to get going with the tools in an instant,” say Martin Recker and Paul Hauptmeier.

Premium partner
Barco is a premium partner of the Genius Loci Festival. Via AED Display – also a premium partner –, we also provided a series of HDF and HDX projectors to power the projection mappings at the different locations (the Tempelherrenhaus, the Stern and the Sternbrücke). So if you’re in the area, between 12 and 14 August, this is a must-do on your bucket list!