Sonic Sphere is an ever-evolving concert hall for th21st Century. Conceived in the tradition of German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kugelauditorium, a nearly spherical concert hall built for the 1970 World Expo in Osaka, Sonic Sphere is the Brainchild of Ed Cooke, a British cognitive science expert and entrepreneur, sound architect Merijn Royaards, and engineering director Nicholas Christie. Since 2021, Cooke and his team have built Sonic Spheres in France, the United Kingdom, Mexico, and the United States, including Burning Man. Each time, the hall has grown bigger; the sphere at The Shed in New York City is the 11th and most advanced sphere, after iterations of increasing size and technical sophistication.
The result is the first Sonic Sphere to be suspended in air, costing more than $2 million. The infrastructure includes 1,178 steel struts, 3,500 yards of cloth, and 12 structural cables supporting the sphere from the roof. The vast, 65-foot-diameter spherical concert hall has a capacity of roughly 250 people, who sit or lie in netted areas. This revolutionary new architectural space features immersive, 3-D sound and light explorations of music by boundary- pushing artists. Within the sphere, guests are surrounded by 124 meticulously arranged loudspeakers that move sound above, below, through, and around the body. Sound and light waves are sculpted into spatialized, temporal architectures. Together, they create hyperreal and deeply multisensory, shared experiences. To power the immersive experience, the creative team behind the Sonic Sphere turned to the award-winning amplifiers from LEA Professional.
“We were amazed with the LEA Amplifiers,” said Merijn Royaards, Creative Director at Sonic Sphere. “The footprint of each amplifier was a lot smaller, they perform over and above what we were used to, and they have got a really helpful interface and an excellent way of tuning a system, which we were missing very much with our previous solution. And suddenly, many previously difficult or impossible things were easy for us to accomplish.”
