Projection Mapping Realism - Yamaha AFC Immersive Sound Connects Viewers In Tokyo

For a week in mid-March, the west end of Tokyo’s Shibuya station was the site for a unique projection mapping event, titled Connect. To ensure the public was fully engaged with the installation, a Yamaha AFC immersive audio installation was included.

In collaboration with private companies, the Tokyo metropolitan government has developed a number of projection mapping events in the city. Enhancing the urban landscape through the effects of light and sound, the projects help to make Tokyo an important destination for a new night-time tourism economy based on the experience.

Shibuya station is where six metro lines and Japan Railways services converge. The area is also undergoing large scale redevelopment, of the kind which is said to take place only every hundred years.

Commissioned by the metropolitan government and the Tokyo Projection Mapping Executive Committee, the Connect project was themed FLOAT and was screened on the south building of the former Tokyu Toyoko department store, at the west exit of Shibuya station.

As well as celebrating a place which has a fluid sense of perpetual transformation, where people and things and events are always entering, leaving and new events are being born, the project was designed as a memorial to the ‘old’ Shibuya. This is a key reason why images were projected on the walls of a building scheduled to be demolished.

The area around Shibuya station is surrounded by a mass of visual information on advertising displays and signs for train routes. To realise the full concept, the project had to be more than just video projection, but rather a complete work of art. Sound was an essential element to immerse the visitor in the experience and help them to really ‘feel’ the art.

Two areas were prepared with audio, a pathway where people would pass through and a viewing area where they could stop, with different immersive sound movements in each. The soundtrack was prepared by YNICE, a project team of musicians rooted in electronica and jazz, which specialises in developing of three-dimensional sound for events, unique spaces and in-vehicle sound. The team was commissioned to compose music which would be “the fascinating essence of the flowing night time in Tokyo.”

To deliver the immersive soundtrack, a Yamaha AFC Active Field Control system was installed in both the pathway and viewing area locations.

The audio system was built on a Dante network, with the soundtrack played back by Steinberg Nuendo running on a dedicated PC, then routed via an AIC-128D Dante accelerator card and an MRX7-D matrix processor, to be rendered by the AFC system and input to a pair of XMV8140-D multi-channel power amplifiers.

Nuendo was also used for transmission of the sound image position data. Automation of sound image movement was written using the integrated VST multi-panner, with the position information sent to the AFC using Nuendo’s ADM authoring function.

12 VXS8, two-way surface mount speakers were used for playback, eight placed in the viewing area and four on the pathway. In the viewing area the speakers were positioned to surround listeners, creating a rich, immersive space, while on the pathway they were arranged in a linear array to deliver a natural-sounding soundscape as people walked along.

Free speaker placement was achieved by the zoning feature of AFC Image, which enabled individual speakers to be specified for the rendering of the sound images. Meanwhile, to achieve similar sound movement in two areas with completely different speaker configurations, the rendering area conversion feature of AFC automatically converted sound moving from left to right in the viewing area to moving from one end to the other along the pathway, naturally reconciling complex sound movements in both areas.

As it was an outdoor event, AFC’s 3D reverb function was also used to create artificial reverberation within each space. This creating a spatial environment which precisely matched the atmosphere of the visuals and the two different spaces.