ProSoundWeb: R&B star Usher brought his Las Vegas residency at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace in August to a new level with a VIP immersive experience utilizing Meyer Sound technology.
Ushh: Backstory Pass, the immersive pre-show experience at a Las Vegas residency, is a production that takes guests through musical eras and moments throughout Usher’s career.
3 comments:
As someone who is quite familiar with the live entertainment of Las Vegas, it was really interesting to read about this new immersive experience done for Usher’s residency at Caeser’s Palace. Although I am not a huge fan of Usher and his music, I am still fascinated by the innovative sound design done to bring this experience to life; the combination of Meyer Sound systems and space flexibility is really impressive in terms of creating an incredibly sensory and engaging viewing for the audience. The unique layout of the space this pre-show exhibition resides in also influenced the process of production; the ability for the moods and themes and even time periods of the various sections of the showing to fluidly change in a controlled environment was well demonstrated in this article. I wonder how this kind of technology could be implemented into modern-day theatre, especially due to the highly immersive impact Meyer Sound Systems are able to create.
Las Vegas entertainment is always interesting when it comes to both what it wants to do and how it gets accomplished, and this pre-show experience is no different. The sound designer has the challenge of both being an installation artist, creating soundscapes in rooms to emulate moments in Usher’s career, and also having to design for a live band on top of that. On the first part, designer Steven Zeller uses a combination of both installation speakers and a Meyer Sound tool called Spacemap Go to mix the space live and “put the sound in space”, so to speak. In the article they list all of the different speakers used, and it still blows my mind how many different varieties are used just to create these couple of rooms. While most rooms utilized this tool to create a pre-done soundscape, a ‘Jazz Club’ room in the experience also has a live band that’s playing in addition to a soundscape for futuristic transition sounds, adding another layer to the complexity. The creativity of Vegas and the engineering feats they accomplish will never cease to amaze me.
Las Vegas residencies are really giving new life to artists who haven’t hit the charts recently. I love the idea of a pre-show experience, and the fact that it is immersive is really wonderful. I would have thought that video more so than sound would be the biggest factor in immersive experiences, especially if the video was 3-D, but the more that I think about it makes sense that sound could play such a big part in an immersive experience. It seems that sound systems were customized to work best for each of the rooms that was helping tell the story, and equipment that was known to be very flexible in ability. Its so great that there are so many jobs in the entertainment field like this that are one-of-a-kind and give the designers and engineers a chance to really think outside the box and go out of their normal comfort zones to create something really special.
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