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TIMELESS MUSIC GAINS A NEW DIMENSION

Behind the scenes of “The Exhibition – Their Mortal Remains” with Sennheiser

Dortmund/Wedemark, 13 November 2018 – After successful runs in both and

Rome, “The Pink Floyd Exhibition – Their Mortal Remains” has now arrived in Germany at the U Dortmund. This immersive multimedia exhibition looks back over the legendary rock band’s 50-year career, combining sound, visuals and memorabilia in an extraordinary retrospective. Yet recreating this exhibition is than just a logistical challenge – it is a work of careful and painstaking artistry. Simon Rhodes, senior engineer with the Abbey

Road Studios, and Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell, exhibition co-curator and co-founder of , the legendary design studio behind Pink Floyds’ album art and imagery, share insights about their creative work.

“The Pink Floyd Exhibition: Their Mortal Remains” presents the ultimate treat for fans of the iconic British rock band. It features over 300 previously unseen artefacts collected over the band’s eclectic 50-year history. This legacy is brought thrillingly to life via an intuitive

Sennheiser audio guide system which lets visitors journey in time through an experience that seamlessly evokes the sights, sounds, memories and – naturally – the music.

Bringing the Abbey Road Studios to Dortmund

Unquestionably, the musical highlight is the immersive Performance Zone, where visitors can experience a 2005 live performance of “” recreated in an all new 17-channel remix using Sennheiser’s AMBEO 3D audio technology. The experience is startlingly real – as if being in the audience of the concert with sound from the stage and from the crowd enveloping visitors from every side and from above.

The AMBEO remix was created at London’s renown Abbey Road Studios by producers Simon

Rhodes and Simon Franglen, who worked closely with Pink Floyd associate and recording engineer Andy Jackson. Simon Rhodes recalled: “We hired Studio 2, which was big enough to enable us to sort of walk around in the sound field and get a real feel for how the mix would translate in the real world.”

“It was great that the BBC used so many microphones to record this performance at the Live 8 concert as it meant that there were no technical problems to deal with,” continued Rhodes, adding with classic British understatement that “it was just a case of replicating the original

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song and enjoying the space, playing with the space, using plug-ins… When you can use all those microphones, you get the incredible feeling of really being there.”

Each time the exhibition travels to a new venue, Simon Rhodes is on site to (re)work his magic:

“The mix was designed to go into a performance space, and as the playback system is so dependent on the room, you have to tune the mixes to the room itself.”

The best PA experience, ever

The 25 Neumann studio monitors that totally immerse the Dortmund Performance Zone in voluptuous sound are set up as in the Abbey Road’s Studio 2: the lower ones just above head- height, a second ring a few metres higher and two so-called “voice of God” loudspeakers placed about 5 metres above the ground.

“You’ve also got the various environmental factors of the space,” explained Rhodes. “For example here in Dortmund, the front six speakers, the lower three and the upper three, are behind a screen, so that’s a case of tuning those to ensure that the sound will be as in the studio.”

Each individual frequency band was carefully tuned until the mix once again sounded the same as in a perfect studio environment. Rhodes’ personal touch was vital: The highly experienced sound engineer and musician remembers all of the fine details of the original mix.

“The orchestra is all around you, and you’ll hear all of that if you listen very carefully. We’ve put a lot of effort into replicating the delays, but within the space. So they are very much like in the original, but they come out of different places. The mix is very 360 degrees.” For example,

Roger Waters’ voice at the beginning can be heard from high up in the air from the voice of

God speakers, before ’s voice comes in from the side. “You have a really massive change of perspective and colour, and that’s kind of fun.” A vitally important role is played by the subwoofers: “A sub is such a wonderful thing to have, and having seven of them is just amazing. And these are studio speakers, high-quality monitor speakers that have been adapted to PA use. Which probably makes it the best PA experience you’ll ever have!”

For Rhodes, it was particularly fitting to bring an innovative new dimension to the sonic experience of the exhibition: “The special thing about doing AMBEO mixes for Pink Floyd is that it's really part of their DNA and it always has been. They’re pushing the boundaries of BACKGROUNDER 3/6

sound, they’re always looking forward to the next speaker configuration. And AMBEO is really so flexible and the future in terms of its immersiveness and freeing you really from traditional formats. Mixing for an installation is a lot freer. You're not always having to double check to see what it sounds like in 5.1 or stereo. You just listen in AMBEO all day long and you just enjoy it.”

The vision behind the iconic imagery

Alongside the exhibition’s audio tour de force is a sumptuous visual feast. Co-curators Paula

Webb Stainton and Aubrey “Po” Powell spoil visitors with the iconic imagery and objects that surrounded the band’s creative output. Powell, alongside his creative partner and fellow design legend, , has been a long-time collaborator with the band. Via their design studio, Hipgnosis, Powell and Thorgerson were the creative powerhouse behind many of the band’s album covers and imagery, crafting an aesthetic that has had a lasting impact on popular culture.

Asked about the conception of the exhibition, shared: “When the job came to me to be the creative director and curator of this exhibition, I decided to make it as big as possible. I wanted to make it the way that Pink Floyd are seen which is very grand, full of largesse. Paula, when she came on board, she already knew where quite a lot of the artifacts, objects and photographs were because she had worked on an earlier, small exhibition in Paris.

We then set out to find them again. And this was an interesting process because Pink Floyd have various warehouses that we went to look through. I was staggered at what was in them.”

“There were things like a pile of pigs in a corner from all their tours in the 1970s which were completely perished. Then we started opening boxes and there we found the most incredible things. I found the original wife from tour in 1980/1981, I found the original teacher from those periods of time but, again, they had been stored in boxes for decades and consequently they were perished. So we decided to ask because he toured The

Wall some five or six years ago if we could use his recreations of those, and what you see in the exhibition is actually a replica of the teacher but it’s exact to the original. Then we found all sorts of things that came out of the woodwork, all sorts of instruments, the original Binson

Echorec sound machine that Pink Floyd used right back in the beginning. Then of course I went to each of the band and asked them what they had. Well, some of them kept very little but Nick

Mason had collected things since the very beginning. He even had his original psychedelic shirts and hat that he used to wear on stage in 1968, he had amazing diaries, and all sorts of BACKGROUNDER 4/6

things. And then I went to look at Roger Waters’ storage which he has at home in England. I found the original lyrics for The Wall all scribbled on bits of paper. And you look at these things and you think, well this was written in 1979, something like that, and it’s written in biro and this is the actual piece of paper that he wrote those lyrics on. And to have that in your hands after so many years, and that is such a culturally important document and The Wall being such an important message, very typical Roger Waters, very typical Pink Floyd, full of political overtones, full of social commentary, full of all aspects of life that we experience. And the best thing we found, which I love more than anything, was when we went back to Roger Waters’ old school. His school in , where we found the original cane and caning book that was used to beat Roger and and Storm Thorgerson, my partner in Hipgnosis, in school.”

Surprisingly, “The Pink Floyd Exhibition: Their Mortal Remains”, is the very first exhibition that

Aubrey Powell had designed, and he approached the task with a clear design concept in mind:

“An exhibition is not just about looking at objects, it’s about the human experience, the emotional experience of looking through an exhibition. It must be touching, it must touch you.

And you have to design it in a way that people feel comfortable, so to move from one thing to the other has to be easy but also that they have time to dwell in the places they want to be and study what they want to study and that depends on each individual person. One of the hardest things is how to engage the visitor to the exhibition in a way that will keep their interest. So one of the tricks that I like is that you’re first travelling through a corridor of albums and people sometimes think “Oh, OK, you know, this is an exhibition of album covers and bits and pieces and artifacts and objects” and then when you reach the Animals and The Wall it opens out into this huge space with the enormous reproduction of The Wall and suddenly you go “Oh my God, this is Pink Floyd. This is the huge part of Pink Floyd.” And that was something that I wanted intentionally to design so this big open space is there. So from this room-like existence you are born into this huge space and that was a very conscious design decision.”

Aubrey Powell’s Hipgnosis actually turned 50 this year, which is celebrated with a retrospective on Hipgnosis’ wider creative output, “Daring to dream. 50 Years of Hipgnosis” for which Powell revisited a rich treasure trove of archive material including artwork and photography for bands, theatres and other projects. Album covers played an important role in

Hipgnosis’ work: “Sometimes we did what we would call non-covers, where you have no title on the front, no name of the band, just the picture. And the most famous one of that is the Pink

Floyd cow of . Cause it’s just a picture of a cow. It has no relationship to

Pink Floyd, to music, to the lyrics, to anything. Roger Waters said: “Brilliant! That’s it!” And they BACKGROUNDER 5/6

called this a non-cover because it was all about nothing. Everyone wondered, “What is this?” It was a huge selling thing, just having a cow. Because it was lateral thinking, not the obvious having the band all dressed in pink, you know.”

For the Dortmund leg, the exhibition was edited especially: “Of course we could have filled ten museums with what we found so I had to be very, very specific. Because when you design an exhibition like this the attention span of those people going around such an exhibition is probably around an hour and 15 minutes, an hour and a half. We found with the Victoria and

Albert Museum which was a little bit bigger than this as a size of exhibition that people would be staying for two, two and a half hours. That’s too long in a way for people to really absorb.

So, we edited the exhibition a little bit and I think this what we have here at the U Dortmund is about as perfect as it gets in terms of size and scale.”

Aubrey Powell is also thrilled with the Performance Zone: “I have to say that working with

Sennheiser’s Robert Généreux and Simon Rhodes from the Abbey Road studios – they are so intense about getting the sound extraordinary. The first thing I experienced in the Victoria and

Albert Museum was the fact that people came out crying. It really touched them. Many people left that exhibition crying, because Comfortably Numb is such a moving song. Plus, the key thing for me is that you have all the memories. People remember where they were, how they heard the music first. So what happens in that Performance Zone is almost like they’ve had this memorable experiences brought back. So, it’s a walk down memory lane and then you reach the Performance Zone, you hear Comfortably Numb and it’s almost too much, people are full with emotion. The first time I walked into that Performance Zone, I felt lifted off the ground, physically lifted off the ground, and that again helps with the emotional experience. And to me, when I see this, I think we’ve succeed in creating something that touches people.”

“The Pink Floyd Exhibition: Their Mortal Remains” at the U in Dortmund will run until 10

February 2019.

About Sennheiser Shaping the future of audio and creating unique sound experiences for customers – this aim unites Sennheiser employees and partners worldwide. Founded in 1945, Sennheiser is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of headphones, microphones and wireless transmission systems. With 21 sales subsidiaries and long-established trading partners, the company is active in more than 50 countries and operates its own production facilities in Germany, Ireland, Romania and the USA. Since 2013, Sennheiser has been managed by Daniel Sennheiser and BACKGROUNDER 6/6

Dr. Andreas Sennheiser, the third generation of the family to run the company. In 2017, the Sennheiser Group generated turnover totaling €667.7 million. www.sennheiser.com

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Equipment list for the Performance Zone

18 Neumann KH 420 midfield monitor loudspeakers

8 Neumann KH 870 subwoofers

Audio guide system for visitors

900 Sennheiser guidePORT receivers (model GP EK 3202-5)

900 Sennheiser HD 2.20s headphones

90 guidePORT charging systems for ten receivers each (GP L 3202-10)

12 guidePORT cell transmitters (GP SR 3200)

20 guidePORT active antenna units (GP AM 3000)

50 guidePORT identifiers (GP ID 3200-out)

Sennheiser guidePORT Installation Manager software

Mixing sessions at the Abbey Road Studios

Watch the video about the AMBEO 3D mixing session at the Abbey Road studios: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMlFN8V4qW4