Meyer Sound Provides Stunning Audio for Heilung Concert at Roskilde Festival

Living on the Edge of Sound: Heilung's Transcendent Roskilde Performance

Old and new blended seamlessly at the 2024 Roskilde Festival, where Heilung took the stage with an electrifying collaboration with Meyer Sound. The band's performance transformed into a sensory journey, thanks to Meyer Sound's Spacemap Go spatial sound tool, elevating traditional music into a breathtaking audio spectacle.

Music, Ancestry, and Modern Technology

Heilung, a band that breathes, lives, and thrives on prehistoric cultures and primal sounds, partnered with Meyer Sound engineers to craft an immersive experience that enveloped audiences in another world. Consisting of musicians from Denmark, Norway, and Germany, this unique ensemble weaves traditional Iron Age instruments, rituals, and modern music techniques to create a sonic time-capsule. Coined as "amplified history," their performances marry ancient acoustics and modern technology to transport audiences to bygone eras. By combining nature sounds, like drumming on animal hides and stone resonations, with techniques such as the hauntingly beautiful throat singing, Heilung masterfully constructs an atmosphere that resonates with a deeply shamanistic energy.

For Roskilde Festival 2024, Heilung sought a more profound audiovisual involvement. And there, Meyer Sound came into play, elevating the immersive experience to unprecedented levels. The challenge lay in preserving the authentic, primal ambiance while exploring the infinite possibilities of spatial sound.

Heilung at Rosklide Festival 2024

The Magic Behind Spacemap Go

Meyer Sound's Spacemap Go stood at the heart of the powerful stage performance. This revolutionary spatial sound design and mixing tool grants sound engineers, artists, and creators control over sound in space to produce fully immersive experiences. Leveraging Meyer Sound's formidable GALAXY processors and an intuitive iPad-based user interface, users can manipulate sound paths in real-time to create captivating soundscapes.

Arve Gotfredsen, a technical support specialist at Meyer Sound, worked closely with Heilung for two months to fine-tune the soundscapes for their performance. The task was to create the most immersive experience possible without compromising the music and primal atmosphere.

Spacemap Go allowed the band to translate their musical ideas into a spatial sound design. They relied on a smaller speaker system in a studio in Denmark to initially simulate the sound distribution. The concepts developed there were later transferred to the massive Arena Stage, which accommodated 17,000 spectators.

Spatial Sound Design with Spacemap Go

Meyer Sound's Spacemap Go boasts critical features that enabled Heilung to realize their visual and auditory dream.

Control on the Go: Operated via an iPad app, Spacemap Go allows users to move sound sources with a simple tap. The graphical interface displays speaker arrangements and sound paths, which can be manipulated effortlessly using basic gestures. This user-friendly interface opens up uncharted territories for creativity.
Scalability: The system adapts to various needs, from intimate settings to grandiose arenas. It supports up to 32 input and 256 output channels, making it adaptablefor a vast array of applications, including concerts, theater performances, and cutting-edge installations.
Real-Time Sound Manipulation: Spacemap Go offers the ability to create and modify sound paths in real-time. This means that sound sources can be dynamically shifted through space, mesmerizing audiences with a deep sense of immersion in the audio landscape.
Integration with Popular Software Solutions: Spacemap Go melds seamlessly with digital audio workstations (DAWs) such as Ableton Live, Pro Tools, or Logic Pro. It also works flawlessly with show control programs like QLab, making it highly versatile for live and studio environment.
Unbridled Creativity: With the user-friendly interface, even less experienced users can unleash intricate spatial audio effects. This opens up a broad palette of creative possibilities, whether it's simulating the buzzing of a distant insect or engulfing the audience in a cosmic symphony.

Spacemap Go has demonstrated its versatility in numerous creative settings. For example, sound artist Bill Fontana used it for an installation at the Kunsthaus Graz, while sound designer Leon Rothenberg employed it for an off-Broadway production.

Arena Stage: An Audio-Visual Masterpiece

The imposing Arena Stage at Roskilde Festival donned a fearsome exterior, stretching 70 meters wide and 50 meters deep, with a capacity for thousands of spectators. To fill the daunting space with Heilung's immersive sound, Meyer Sound relied on a combination of 46 large-format PANTHER loudspeakers, 24 2100-LFC subwoofers, 36 LEOPARD loudspeakers, six 900-LFC units as delay systems, and 32 ULTRA-X 40 point source loudspeakers. All speakers were controlled by the GALAXY processor, enabling the sound engineers to dynamically alter the sound image during the show.

"Put simply, we couldn't risk having the drummer in one speaker and the vocalist in another. The solution we found was that sounds placed you in specific locations. These could be natural sounds or otherworldly sounds, depending on the mood we wanted to create," explained Finn Jansen, FOH-Engineer at Roskilde.

By strategically positioning sounds, they could immerse the audience in various settings, from the depths of a dark forest to the cosmosstretching endlessly above. To achieve this, the X40s were 'fed' different reverbs and sound effects from the console using a matrix.

"Together with the acoustics of the tent, the Galileo [GALAXY processor] is the core element of our creation. It let us craft this magnificent matrix and tweak it as needed."

Fresh Remix of Live Performance

A peek under Heilung's mystic veil reveals a commitment to delivering a powerful atmospheric experience over bombastic special effects. The band aimed to transcend the soundscape from a mere technical trick into an immersive sonic journey that complemented their spiritual and ritualistic music. This philosophy helped address technical challenges, such as synchronizing rhythms across vast distances in the Arena Stage.

Christopher Juul, the band's leader, explained, "Think about 3D in cinema; it's sometimes amusing when something jumps out at us, but for an entire movie or show, it would be excessive. We wanted to delve deeper instead."

Meyer Sound and Roskilde: A Groundbreaking Alliance

For Meyer Sound, the collaboration with Heilung was the tip of the iceberg for a larger project at Roskilde Festival. The company also applied Spacial Sound techniques to create immersive soundscapes on other stages like the Gloria Stage. In addition, Meyer Sound unveiled a specially designed Spatial Tent in the artist's village, allowing visitors to tinker with the technology themselves. Engineers, artists, and producers could experiment with new creative approaches to the use of spatial sound in live performances.

Meyer Sound views these projects as a stepping stone for future festivals and performances, as they aim to further pushing the boundaries of audio technology and artistic expression in live music events.

"My dream would be to return to Roskilde next year and see how the seeds we planted this year sprout into new spatial experiences for the audience and new creative possibilities for the artists."

The Future of the Sonic Symphony

The partnership between Meyer Sound and Heilung at Roskilde Festival 2024 set a bold precedent for the future of immersive sound design in live events. By integrating Meyer Sound's Spacemap Go and advanced loudspeaker technology, Heilung transcended the boundaries of traditional performances into a symphony that fused sound, space, and visual elements into a harmonious whole.

This performance demonstrates that the future of live music transcends mere sound amplification and hinges on the creative use of space and technology. Artists like Heilung and technology companies like Meyer Sound pave the way for reimagined concerts and festival experiences that far surpass conventional performances. As this groundbreaking technology continues to evolve, the live performance landscape will be forever changed.

Cover photo: Uncle Allan

[1] Spacemap Go: Not Just a Spatial Sound Tool - It's a Creator's Dream (2022, March 29). [online] Available at: https://proavlivesound.com/2022/03/29/spacemap-go-not-just-a-spatial-sound-tool-it-s-a-creators-dream/

[2] Meyer Sound's Spacemap Go Elevates Heilung's Roskilde Festival Performance (2024, July 02). [online] Available at: https://rootsandbranches.eu/2024/07/02/meyer-sounds-spacemap-go-elevates-heilungs-reskilde-festival-performance/

Heilung, with their unique blend of traditional instruments, modern music techniques, and immersive spatial sound, have captivated audiences with an otherworldly audio-visual journey at the Roskilde Festival.
Meyer Sound's Spacemap Go tool played a crucial role in fine-tuning the soundscapes for Heilung's striking performance, allowing them to translate their musical ideas seamlessly into spatial sound and elevate their concerts to new heights of immersion, tying together the realms of technology, entertainment, music, and data-and-cloud-computing in a mesmerizing fusion.