In his younger days, Jonathan Burke decided to try his hand at playing guitar. “I was never very good but wound up being more interested in how things sounded and the technology to make it happen,” he said.
Burke’s curiosity may not have launched a music career, but it has resulted in a thirty-year journey in sound design and engineering that has taken him around the world, from his native U.K. to Hong Kong and the United States, where he now resides and leads the sound design program in the School of Theater, Film and Television at the University of California, Los Angeles. This summer, that journey brought him to Ohio to create the one-of-a-kind soundscape for Cincinnati Opera’s three Summer at Summit productions.
Below, Burke offers an insider’s view of the unique challenges found in designing sound for outdoor opera.
Photo by Philip Groshong: Jonathan Burke prepares for a performance at Cincinnati Opera’s Summer at Summit
What is it about sound design that appeals to you?
For me, it is a nice blend of music, technology, and artistic satisfaction. I think I knew it was going to be a career when I started getting offered work during college. There weren’t many people doing it, and I got lucky landing some great jobs where I was supported and pushed to use new tools and ideas. Now that I have done this for a large portion of my life, I love sharing what I have learned with the new generation of designers and engineers. I truly love what I do.
Creating an amazing sound experience for everyone on Summit Park’s Great Lawn was a top priority for Cincinnati Opera this season. Tell us about the sound design.
I wanted the entire venue to sound like it was a concert hall. So, I had to look at coverage across the entire field—450 feet deep and 250 feet wide. Getting clear vocals across the lawn was the initial focus so that everyone had a great experience. Then we looked at how to add surround speakers in an inconspicuous way, so the illusion of reverb was built into the sound system from the start.
The challenge of COVID meant the musicians, singers, and chorus were separated more than they might have been in normal circumstances. So, each person has a close microphone on their instrument, and each chorus member is on their own microphone, which is not typical. Getting it to sound musical and cohesive was top priority.
Photo by Philip Groshong: Guests enjoy a performance of Cincinnati Opera’s The Barber of Seville at Summit Park.
The L-Isa system from L-Acoustics that you’re using allows you to create an almost immersive soundscape for audience members. Can you offer the non-technical version of how that’s accomplished?
I am using an L-ISA processor, which is an object-based immersive system. What that means is we treat every sound as its own source and place it in the “space” of the sound system. So, for example, a harp plays down toward house left as you look at the stage, so it is placed in the soundscape there. Each sound has an individual sound “object” that we place around the space. It is achieved by the processor taking each sound and calculating its relationship to all the speakers in the system in terms of distance and tonal quality.
We then use what is called a room engine to create a very natural sounding reverb that the individual sounds also feed into. An object farther away in the soundscape sounds exactly specific to where the musician plays onstage. In total, we have close to 90 individual sources being processed this way—even Evans’s microphone for his preshow speech is sourced to the exact location on stage where he stands!
L-Acoustics was really excited about this project and gave a lot of support during the planning stages, even sending two application engineers to help get everything dialed in. It was wonderful.
Photo by Philip Groshong: The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra at Cincinnati Opera’s Summer at Summit.
What are the most important considerations when designing sound for outdoor vs. indoor performances?
Creating a “room” is important because there are no acoustic reflections—other than unwanted ones off the distant buildings. The sound just travels until it dissipates. I had to think about creating positions for the speakers to hang in a venue that was just a concrete slab. Also, outdoors there is no natural buildup of low frequencies, so we need a tremendous amount of power and control to make instruments such as basses and timpani sound natural.
Because I have this overall sound illusion I am trying to create, I start to creep the sounds of the orchestra in about 10 minutes before the show starts. You hear everyone tuning and warming up in the correct sound environment, just as you would hear in a concert hall.
Photo by Philip Groshong: Tenor Russell Thomas (Mario Cavaradossi) and soprano Ana María Martínez (Floria Tosca) star in Cincinnati Opera’s Tosca.
What is the biggest challenge of designing sound for outdoor opera?
Weather! In addition to the challenge of keeping lots of very expensive equipment dry when it rains, the varying temperature and humidity affect how sound travels at different frequencies. A daytime rehearsal might sound very different in the evening because of these factors. We have a weather probe on the computer with the system equalization on it that tweaks it slightly as the day goes on to correct for this change. Wind is also a factor that had to be considered in relation to the hanging speakers on the canopy as well as the blowing across sensitive microphones.
On a practical end, the distances needed to connect everything are huge. A cable run from stage left to the front of house is well over 500 feet. We had to use fiberoptic cables because that distance is over the specs of a normal cable. This also gives the benefit of keeping everything digital as soon as it leaves the stage.
Finally, sweat! This isn’t unique to outdoors but is greatly exaggerated with actors in heavy costumes wearing small microphones in July in Ohio. We have transmitters that are fairly waterproof, but there is always the possibility of sweat getting into the microphone itself. We have double mics on many of the performers but still have the possibility of sweating both out. The deck crew are running around working to mitigate this challenge throughout the show.
One thing audiences might not know is how much of the equipment gets set up and taken down each day: the entire front-of-house mix position, which has the console, four computers, six screens, and several processors. The subwoofers and front-fill speakers get turned over and packed up, the main speaker arrays get lowered to the deck, and the cables to the surround speakers all get pulled and packed up. All the orchestra and chorus microphones onstage get taken down. This setup starts at 2:30 p.m. for an 8:30 p.m. show so we have time to patch it all and test it before the evening performance.
Photo by Philip Groshong: Mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges (Carmen) and tenor Stephen Costello (Don José) star in Cincinnati Opera’s Carmen.
By the Numbers
Cincinnati Opera’s sound system for Summer at Summit includes:
60 flown speakers on the towers and canopy
16 subwoofers on the floor in front of the stage
9 front-fill speakers on top of the subwoofers
6 surround speakers hidden on the park lighting poles
15 monitors around the stage and backstage
16 wireless microphones
36 headsets and transmitters
45 orchestra microphones/inputs
36 chorus microphones
12 QLab inputs for various sound effects
120 total inputs on the mixing console