Mitch Allen

I have spent the last 8yrs leading the acoustic design of Metro Martin Place. 2400hrs of my life and many multiples of that from colleagues. It opened to the public last week amidst a flurry of Linkedin posts from the thousands of people that have made it a reality.

A part of the unsoclicited proposal by Macquarie was to include a pedestrian link that connected both ends of the station and tower lobbies. Grimshaw began to envision this space as an immersive installation - Muru Giligu. We helped realise that vision in collaboration with Lendlease with specification of a fully configurable spatial loudspeaker system with individually addressable loudspeakers and a Digital Audio Workstation back end.

Many hours in the SoundLab and some day one test content created by my friend and colleague Nic Justin helped guide both the refinement of acoustic treatment and audio system design. There is 50mm absorption and 17x mid range loudspeakers which are well concealed within the top of each of the mirrored services booms. This base system and built form provides the platform for many artist competitions to come.

I took the team for a tour throughout the station and to experience the finished product in its entirety. As the lead designer, I will always see and hear details that nobody else will pick up on or know the background to. Overall I am happy with the outcome and it is always nice to stand in a place to which you contributed so much over the years.

I had the wonderful privilege of being invited to contribute to the Tertiary Built Environment Creative Lab as part of the Sydney Opera House Build Creative Learning Programme. 

Working closely with the Head of Education & Communities at Sydney Symphony and the wonderful members of the Fellowship programme at SSO, we developed a super fun listening tour through various spaces throughout the Opera House and surrounds.

The format in each space followed the rough format of an invitation to a lens through which to listen, followed by a performance, and then an interactive sharing session on what was experienced by both the audience and performers. The students from Western Sydney University were amazing and engaged with the experience perfectly. The Fellowship performers were insightful and their performances gave me goose bumps. He is a picture of me enjoying one of those goose bump moments...

The ACMI Renewal Project opens today. This has been a long time coming since working on audio, lighting and acoustic concepts in collaboration with  Second Story in New York and  Ben Kreukniet in Amsterdam before the word ‘pandemic’ was in such common use.

The concept grew significantly over time from individual exhibition audio to a complex fully integrated Dante network enabling centralised management of all exhibition content. This also enabled a spatial soundscape to be composed throughout the exhibition which serves to support the installations while promoting better sound masking between open plan galleries. Many a late night was spent on international calls to reconfigure the technology to push the experience as far as it could be pushed within budget available. I am glad we pushed.

The lighting is sublime and was coordinated by colleague and friend Tim Hunt. The effort in delivering the audio and acoustic vision of an international design team through a global pandemic cannot be over stated and the efforts of Will Gouthro and Terry Ryan are to thank for that, amongst others. 

We are currently working with the Australian National Botannical Gardens in Canberra to provide a holistic soundscape design for the various exhibition spaces. To create the best outcome, we are adopting our passive, active and persuasive design approach  to sculpt an overall soundscape that complements the content being displayed.

Contrasting passive acoustic treatment has been specified to enhance transitions between entry corridors, large volume glass houses and smaller educational exhibition spaces. 

An active spatial loudspeaker array has been designed for the various spaces and a bespoke natural soundscape composed, the content of which is endemic to each exhibition area. 

We also collaborated with the water feature designer for the project worked to sculpt the sonic aesthetic of a central water feature to be more reflective of the dry tropics and controlled to a level that provides a key note to the space.

I was interviewed at the Sydney Opera House by Eddie Woo on the maths and physics of acoustics.

Rise at 101 Collins Street is an end-of-trip and wellness facility. We worked with wellness specialists Wellineux and branding team Hundredweight to align with brand and vision for the space by creating a bespoke soundscape. 

A key driver for the development was to bring the outside into the basement site. Two skylights were designed to bring in light and bamboo planters to bring in nature. The generative soundscape we composed incorporates biophillic elements including a live interrogation of the nearest weather station that alters the natural elements of the soundscape to reflect meteorological conditions occurring outside the wellness space.

The soundscape is delivered using Ableton Live and fed into the ante space via a Dante network to 10.1 spatial sound system using Meyer loudspeakers.

Great to speak alongside Lauren Clark and my colleague Tateo Nakajima at the online forum convened by Hayball on the topic of designing for sound. Shared some project examples of using sound in unique ways to evoke empathy for different demographics.

Stoked that Turbulentia has been included in the program for this year’s Jena Full Dome Festival. This year it will be online due to the age of contagion. Obviously won’t be the same experience as the spatial mix we spent hours on but glad people will be able to experience nonetheless!

Shouts to Joshua Bevan and Charlie Fry - big congrats!

Image credit: ESO/M. Zamani/Nicolas Bonne

Today at the British Science Festival, ESO Fellow Chris Harrison and Nicolas Bonne, a visually impaired astronomer from the University of Portsmouth presented data sonifications of various astrophysics concepts to the visually impaired and sighted (wearing blindfolds). I was lucky enough to have made the sonficiations in collaboration with my colleague Kim Jones and my brother in law Kashlin McCutcheon. The event was titled a Dark Tour of the Universe and is aimed at making astrophysics and astronomy more accessible to the visally impaired community.

The image above and text below copied from the following site: https://www.eso.org/public/announcements/ann19045/

Audio files

A — Listen to the stars appear at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile

This sonified material allows the audience to listen to the stars appear as they did on 13 September 2019 at ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. The sounds heard represent each star (brightest stars appear first) and the pitch of the sound represents the colour of the star. Time has been sped up. The position of the star in the surround sound systems is also tied to the real position on the night sky. However, the audio file has been modified from full surround sound (6.1) to stereo. This material is part of the A Dark Tour of the Universe astronomy show for the blind and visually impaired.

Credit: Mitchell Allen/Kim Jones (Arup); Chris Harrison/Miranda Jarvis (ESO)

(WAV, MP3)

B — Listen to a Cataclysmic Variable star

Some stars are very variable and have huge changes in brightness as they flare up. This sonified material allows the audience to listen to a Cataclysmic Variable star (V344 Lyr) that shows both short, low-amplitude (lasting for approximately 5 days) and long, large-amplitude (lasting for approximately 15 days) outbursts. The data were taken from NASA’s Kepler mission that tracks how the star varies in brightness through time. This material is part of the A Dark Tour of the Universe astronomy show for the blind and visually impaired, but it has been modified from full surround sound (6.1) to stereo.

Credit: Mitchell Allen and Kim Jones (Arup); Chris Harrison (ESO); Kepler Space Telescope data

(WAV, MP3)

C —  Listen to galaxies merge

Over a timespan of millions to billions of years galaxies can attract each other and subsequently collide or merge. The Milky Way galaxy will eventually collide with the Andromeda galaxy. Although we can not watch this process in real galaxies because it takes too long, we can create a simulation in a computer to speed up time. This sonified material allows the audience to listen to two galaxies merging, and the surround sound enables them to hear the galaxies approach from each side and orbit around each other before finally merging together. This material is part of the A Dark Tour of the Universe astronomy show for the blind and visually impaired, but it has been modified from full surround sound (6.1) to stereo.

Credit: Mitchell Allen/Kim Jones (Arup); Chris Harrison (ESO); Florent Renaud (Lund Observatory)

(WAV, MP3)

For about 3 years now, Neelam Gopalani and I have cultivated a practice at Arup called 10@10. The concept is simple - 10mins meditation at 10am, 3 days a week. 

From a commitment to hold each other accountable to maintain regular practice, the community has expanded to the whole office and beyond. Along the way, we have incorporated bespoke soundscapes and lightscapes in collaboration with Rebecca Cadorin from the Sydney Lighting team. 

Feedback from attendees has been extremely supportive - some stating it is fundamental to their wellness at work. I have certainly appreciated the benefits and have been grateful that it has been of benefit to others too.

Scienceworks - Beyond Perception took home the Distinction Award for Sound Design at this years AGDA Awards!

The Beyond Perception exhibition at Melbourne's Scienceworks incorporates STEM education to inspire young minds in the world of physics. The exhibition spaces titled "Ripples in Spacetime", "Waves at Work", "Energetic Vibrations", and "Turbulent Encounters" are intended to remain in place for the 10yrs. I was engaged to compose long form soundscape content for the entire exhibition. Carefully crafted to support the messaging and aesthetic of the exhibition while providing a deeply immersive and cohesive environment throughout. The sonic content was composed of the very concepts that are the substance of the exhibition. From data sonification to real-time augmentation and generative input, the implementation is a living breathing creation that builds a world of wonder and discovery.

(Photo Credit: Rob Zugaro)

The spatial audio system is a 72.7 channel Yamaha loudspeaker array powered by Dante amplifiers and reproduced using a bespoke audio server program developed by MindBuffer. The content is a combination of pre-programmed compositions and realtime sources, each using generative algorithms to breath life and variability into the experience. 

At the entrance to the experience, the transition into the world beyond perception is introduced through the use of augmented sound. Specific elements of the existing ambient soundscape of the museum are captured in real time and effected to resonate at specific frequencies and reverberate in a wash across the entrance. This harmonic representation of real world sound is amplitude modulated at the frequency of ocean waves that entice the museum visitor into the world of discovery beyond.

(Photo Credit: Ben Healley)

All visitors enter the exhibition via ‘The Cacophony’ which is an abstract amalgamation of the concepts that are contained within the rest of the exhibition. Museum goers are invited to lie on cushions and look up at reflected projections of imagery of the scientific concepts that lie within the other areas of the exhibition. Contrary to the title, the soundscape of this area encourages people to dwell and let the visual and sonic information wash over them. Detuned spherics and radio waves have resonances applied and connect the listener to a world beyond perception. Effected elements of the rest of the exhibition wash in, out and across the space, hinting at the experience that lies beyond.

A series of Shepard tones pan throughout the exhibition rising and falling at different rates and pitches, occasionally pausing on a single tone. All the while the varying pitches add and cancel with each other throughout the space, demonstrating the concept of wave interference. A continuous drone also establishes the tonic of the exhibition and utilises wavetable synthesis to manipulate waveforms that evolve over long periods of immersion. Further higher pitched transients echo through the space, again scrolling through various waveforms, illustrating the discrete make up of complex sounds.

(Photo Credit: Ben Healley)

Sonifications of the Big Bang, the discovery of gravitational waves and radio waves recorded in Saturn’s rings make up some of the content in ‘Ripples in Spacetime’. Museum goers are invited to collide two black holes together on a rear-projected lycra screen. Heat maps have been mapped to different wavetable synth parameters for each screen using Open Sound Control (OSC) for a visceral interactive experience.

(Photo Credit: Ben Healley)

Radio waves recorded in Earth’s ionosphere are combined with the delicate sounds of animals foraging in the undergrowth to accompany the micro vs macro imagery in ‘Waves at Work’. A wash of sonic colour provides a bed track under which the colourful displays can be viewed.

An interactive display showcases fluid dynamics within the ‘Turbulent Encounters’ with varying sonic representations changing in real time using OSC. A bed track of turbulence of varying colour washes across the multiple screens and adjusts with each change in state.

(Photo Credit: Rob Zugaro)

The soundscape of ‘Energetic Vibrations’ can only be felt as a tactile production via actuators in the cushions. A polyrhythm of rhythmic elements from adjacent areas is combined into a tactile composition that resonates with the rest of the exhibition.

The projection mapping turret separates components of a ‘remix’ of other soundscapes into bass, rhythm and colour. The tonal sequence follows a pattern based on the Fibonacci sequence. The accompanying elements utilise concepts from the rest of the exhibition. The combined soundscape drives the projection mapping visuals using FFT analysis of frequency content and can be manipulated at three stations within the turret.

The whole experience is a combination of anticipation and discovery coupled with the beauty and wonder of a fascinating world beyond perception. Hats off to the team that dreamed and delivered it. The whole project is a big step forward, pioneering the future of exhibition design.

And here is a 360 video of (most of) the exhibition: