The Week in Light & Sound
- Details
The three-day conference and expo will focus on the dissemination of top-level research in the field of spatial audio for virtual and augmented reality, with demonstrations and discussions focused on technical solutions and recommended practices. Leading researchers, practitioners and industry luminaries will offer panel discussions, tutorials, and workshops on new and forthcoming technologies.
The keynote presenters are Jean-Marc Jot, distinguished fellow, Magic Leap; Ivan Tashev, partner architect, Microsoft Research Labs Redmond; and Ravish Mehra, lead research scientist, Facebook Reality Labs. Tashev comments: “Audio and video are integral components of AR/VR devices. Spatial audio is an area still under development; we need better capture, representation and rendering technologies. To make it mainstream, we have to catch up with authoring and editing tools as well.”
All Summer Long - California comes to Cropredy. Headlining Fairport Convention’s Cropredy Festival this week will be Beach Boy Brian Wilson who will perform the albumPet Sounds in its entirety. Rolling Stone called Pet Sounds: 50th Anniversary Tour one of the “greatest” tours of 2017. Since launching the tour in 2016, in celebration of the landmark album, the tour has travelled to more than 24 countries across 180 performances.
Pay to Play - A production company has come under fire for plans to charge young people up to £100 to appear in its shows. Spark Live issued two casting calls on its own website for productions of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty.
For Sleeping Beauty, which will be staged at Beccles Public Hall in Suffolk, it said it was looking for 12 young people aged eight to 18, and said any successful applicants would have to pay a fee of £50 to be in the show.
Its production of Cinderella will be staged in theme park Pleasurewood Hills, near Lowestoft. Spark Live initially said it was looking for young people aged 10 to 18, to be part of the ensemble, with a fee to appear in the production of £100.
Although the £100 fee for Cinderella has since been dropped – with the company calling it a “mistake” – the £50 fee for young people to star in Sleeping Beauty remains, with the company claiming the fee will help cover costs of the production.
Moving On - Joanna Read is stepping down as principal of LAMDA to become chief executive of the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre. She joined LAMDA in 2010 and will leave the organisation in January 2019 to join the Guildford venue.
Read said the drama school had been a “privilege and a delight to lead”, but that she was looking forward to returning “full-time to theatre again”. Prior to joining LAMDA, she was chief executive and artistic director of Salisbury Playhouse. Alongside the role of chief executive at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, she will also be theatre director.
(Jim Evans)
7 August 2018
