Kani City Cultural Creation Centre, located in the south-central Gifu Prefecture of Japan, is a venue that was built to present civic activities, including large-scale performances that involve local talent, community-building workshops, and nurturing performing artists and community arts workers.
The main theatre of the Kani City Cultural Creation Centre is designed primarily for live theatrical performances with an acoustic reflection pattern that has a short reverberation time of about 1.6 seconds. In early 2024, the venue hosted an event in which contemporary dance was performed to an orchestral accompaniment. The performance involved dancers on stage while the orchestra was seated in an orchestra pit at the front of the stage that was raised from the pit floor to stage level at different times in the performance. The event challenged the venue staff to find a way to enhance the experience for the audience as the theatre’s acoustic reflectors and additional curtain decorations used in the performance would significantly absorb the sound and not provide a rich, reverberant and immersive atmosphere. The acoustic and audio engineers saw this as an opportunity to upgrade the audio experience for the audience, so they reached out to Yamaha to use its Active Field Control (AFC) Immersive Audio System that would transfer audio over a Dante network.
Hayato Ikeda, a sound engineer with the Kani City Cultural Creation Centre, commented: “The AFC system is based on the assumption that all signals, from the AFC engine and digital mixer to the processor, are exchanged via Dante. This theatre has permanent audio equipment that is fully compatible with Dante, from the Yamaha digital mixer to the power amplifiers, so we were able to make the decision to give AFC a try."
The Yamaha AFC Enhance has detailed, dimensional regenerative electronic reverberation control capabilities which were used in the theatre to create acoustic spaces in which acoustic images were positioned and controlled by AFC Image.
For AFC Enhance, two rows of four microphones were hung from the ceiling to collect the natural sound in the theater, and Ikeda used that sound to process and create a consistent resonance throughout the room regardless of the orchestra pit position.
For AFC Image, 37 microphones were set up in the orchestra pit, and seven boundary microphones were mounted on stage for the dancers. The microphones in the pit were mainly targeted at string instruments and reinforced the parts of the performance where the sound of string instruments has difficulty reaching the audience when the orchestra pit is lowered. The microphone inputs were passed to a Yamaha QL5 digital mixer for EQ before being sent to the AFC engine for spatial processing before being amplified through 37 NEXO speakers installed throughout the theater.
Ikeda concluded: “We made full use of Dante during the show, transmitting data from all 52 microphones through the Dante-enabled Yamaha digital mixers and the AFC engine and out to the amplifiers. This performance would have been virtually impossible without Dante.”