Spring Awakening

From the designer:

"The concept for Spring Awakening’s sound design was trying to evoke the feeling of your your head spinning - spinning with trauma, sexual frustration, love, angst, and depression. Materializing that into the sound design, we leaned towards heavily object oriented sound design. Though the initial concept for the show involved dynamically moving vocals and instruments using Meyer SpaceMap Go, due to various restrictions, we were unable to go through with that plan. The first, and most important, constraint, was the dynamics of the room the performance was in. The McClintock Theater is a smaller blackbox space, and actually getting enough gain on our instrument microphones to convincingly move around instruments, we would be ruining our gain before feedback for our vocal microphones. Additionally, because this production was the first musical at USC in two years due to the pandemic, and the first to want to employ object oriented design, we opted for a simpler solution. Finally, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, both myself and my mixer, Alex, were relatively inexperienced with large scale musicals, and we deemed that it would be a misallocation of time to spend time stuck behind a totally new software.

Instead, we decided to heavily utilize group swaps and various space specific reverbs. Our system effectively was a multi-channel, multi-zone system, with a main PA, side L/R, rear L/R, 2 added upstage speakers for distance and 2 overhead speakers for an omnipresent teacher voice. For each pair of speakers, main L/R, side L/R, and rear L/R, we had stereo vocal groups that we could switch between, out of our standard Center Cluster/Mains setup."