World Heart Beat Embassy Gardens
Located in Nine Elms, Battersea, ra. have designed a multifunctional performance space, recording studios, cafe and teaching rooms for the musical education charity World Heart Beat. The building is embedded with state of the art audio equipment including d&b's Immersive Soundscape Audio System. The use of these technologies will position the building as a blueprint for the future of musical education, with facilities available to students centred on digital production and performance. The venue opened to the public in January 2023 for further details please visit World Heart Beat. Our services included full design from concept, technical and delivery including Contract Administration.
Design Summary
This state of the art of venue, recording studio and teaching facility is located within the ground floor of a residential development at Embassy Gardens, Nine Elms, London. This context meant that acoustic isolation from the apartments above was paramount to the design brief for the project. The highly successful isolation is achieved by creating an inner box of building fabric that is separated from the rest of the building structural using isolated rubber connections to the slab and a completely independent wall and ceiling structure. The acoustic test results achieved with this separation far exceeded those predicted. The performance auditorium has multiple configurations including three different seating layouts, cabaret and a fully standing layout. This flexibility allows the venue to change capacity, allow recording, conferences, and creates varying stage positions giving artists and producers a greater choice over audience experience. The flexibility in stage position created acoustic design challenges as typically the stage position is fixed with reflective and absorptive surfaces are designed around this defined stage location. The challenge of dealing with the this was with through embedding the d&b Soundscape system into the space. This system allows sounds made within the space to be captured and then relayed back to the audience through a sequence of different speakers some integrated into the walls and others hung off the pipe grid above. The two primary features of this technology as described by d&b are;
d&b En-Scene is a sound object positioning tool allowing the individual placement and movement of up to 64 sound objects. It accurately depicts stage scenarios so that each sound object corresponds both visually and acoustically. The entire audience can now hear what it sees and vice versa.
d&b En-Space is an in-line room emulation tool which creates and modifies reverberation signatures for any space. These reverberation signatures are emulations derived from acoustic measurements of seven internationally renowned performance venues and convolved within the audio processor.
The artistic and creative opportunities of this technology coupled with the educational benefits make this and the infrastructure that supports it critical to the venue and its artist lead focus on quality.
