Concrete Voids turns the Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall into an instrument

We speak with Tony Birch, the sound technician behind Concrete Voids, the new sound system at Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall. This feature was originally published on our sister site The Spaces. 

How do you turn a space into an instrument?

London’s Southbank Centre is set to unveil Concrete Voids – a one-of-a-kind sound system conceived and designed by sound technician Tony Birch. The system will debut on 16 March with a performance featuring cellist Peter Gregson, viola da gamba player Liam Byrne, and fiddle player Cleek Schrey, followed by rapper Lex Amor next month. Using the TiMax panLab spatial audio solution, Concrete Voids manipulates sound around the Queen Elizabeth Hall – but don’t mistake it for a typical audiophile system.

With 81 loudspeakers hidden above and below the auditorium, Concrete Voids takes advantage of the Queen Elizabeth Hall’s iconic air vents and chambers, transforming the space into a “three-dimensional instrument.”

“The Queen Elizabeth Hall is an egg-in-a-box design, which is very common in auditoriums,” explains Birch. “You build a big building, and then you build a smaller structure inside it. The void between the two serves as isolation from the outside and from sound escaping.”

For the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the space between these buildings – what Birch calls “concrete chambers” – was unused until he rediscovered them during a refurbishment project in 2018. In 2020, Birch challenged a team of audio engineers to record the natural reverb that occurred in these empty spaces. While the results weren’t useful for a major project, they sparked an idea: “What would happen if you placed the loudspeakers in these massive spaces? What would it sound and feel like in the auditorium?’ That was when the project was born.”

From there, Concrete Voids was developed and tested in collaboration with the aforementioned artists. Despite challenges around building access and resonance issues, some of these problems have contributed to the unique qualities that now form Concrete Voids’s sounds.

“Sometimes, if something shifts, you’ll get a different buzz from somewhere. You’ll get a different resonance, strange noises everywhere,’ Birch explains. ‘The phrase we’ve latched onto is a classical music term called ‘wolf tone,’ which refers to a bad harmonic that occurs in string instruments when two notes don’t quite align.”

“We always find different wolf tones and resonances, but I don’t see that as a challenge. I quite enjoy it, and we’re lucky to have engaged artists who embrace it.”

Birch views these early performances with the Concrete Voids system as an experiment. As the artists trial manipulating the reverb and sound dynamics, Birch will be taking notes to guide future research and collaborations with artists and audiences. “We don’t have a concrete (forgive the pun) idea of how 900 people will affect the system’s performance,” he says.

“We’re looking forward to more exciting collaborations with our resident artists. I’d love to keep it as an experiment. I don’t think we’ll ever come up with a final answer, and I hope we don’t.”

Tickets for Concrete Voids: Peter Gregson + Liam Byrne x Cleek Schrey on Sunday, 16 March, Lex Amor on Saturday, 5 April and Jack Warne——GAUNT on Friday, 3 October are all available to buy via Southbank Centre’s website starting from £17. 

Head over to our sister site The Spaces to read more.