HOLOPLOT, a science-based immersive audio company, has supplied the sound for The Atmosphere stage at the 20th anniversary edition of the Tomorrowland festival, which took place in Belgium this July.
The renowned festival celebrates all genres of electronic music, and the landmark 2024 edition featured 800 of the best electronic artists in the world across 16 stages.
The Atmosphere stage featured DJs such as Amber Broos, Dyen, Ellen Allien, Olympe, and Adam Beyer. Its bespoke circus tent reaches nearly 30m high and 30m wide, and can hold up to 5,000 techno fans.
HOLOPLOT’s X1 system was chosen to provide its sound, which was delivered using two main arrays with six X1 modules each, and six surrounds with two X1 modules each.
Increased sweet spot
The stage’s highly reflective surfaces presented a challenge as they created echoes in the listening area, and prevented an even sweet spot to properly experience the immersive material on stage.
The sound at all of the Tomorrowland stages is managed by Pieter Doms, sound engineer at Noizboyz and co-founder of stereo upmixing solution Areal. He selected the HOLOPLOT system to improve the audio experience at the Atmosphere stage and overcome this challenge.
Doms says: “I was really shocked with the sound quality that was achievable because I expected beamforming to decrease it. It sounds great, almost studio monitor clean. It’s amazing how the quality rises when you just focus audio on the people and don’t create any reflections. You get a very clean sound, and that improves the immersive experience. It gives you that small club feeling, but you’re in a ginormous tent.”
The festival strives to improve music experiences by constantly evolving, actively developing and adopting new technology. HOLOPLOT was Doms’ preferred technology to boost the immersive stage experience and the audio quality at Atmosphere.
Reflecting the festival’s ethos of technological advancement, Tomorrowland and Noizboyz had previously created a new piece of software that enabled them to upmix stereo signals into multi-channel content in real-time. Although this had been in use at Atmosphere for a few years, the designers had previously encountered difficulties due to the tent’s size and the distributed system. Additional loudspeakers were required to achieve the surround sound effects, which resulted in increased reflections and confusion in the diffuse field.
The X1 system improves sound control and uses Areal to deliver immersive, upmixed content to the audience without echoes. This is possible through the use of Wave Field Synthesis and 3D Audio-Beamforming, the two key pillars of HOLOPLOT technology.
Sebastian Boeldt, senior application engineer at HOLOPLOT, says: “Both allow us to control sound in the 3D space. We can precisely shape the coverage areas in the audience zone, but also avoid certain shapes of the venue, minimizing reflections and improving the clarity of the performance.
Small club experience
In addition, HOLOPLOT’s horizontal control enables the creation of controlled coverage zones, as well as the precise gain and delay alignment between them.
“This means we can increase the immersive sweet spot and minimize the delay spread, a key parameter when designing immersive systems,” continues Boeldt. “The combination of sound control via avoidance of the tent surfaces and division of the crowd into time aligned coverage zones create a perfect base canvas for the Areal technology to shine. It’s a really flexible piece of software that paired beautifully with the X1 system.”
Doms adds: “The widespread misconception that loud is always better doesn’t apply here, and thanks to the isolated yet aligned zones X1 created and the multi-channel content from the Areal engine we achieved great results. It sounded really tight, giving that small immersive club feeling.”
Last month, HOLOPLOT announced that its X1 Matrix Array sound system is being used to deliver an enhanced audio experience at The Portal at AREA15, an immersive entertainment district in Las Vegas, US.
