Inside an empty arena on the outskirts of Amsterdam, a PA system pumps out Elton John hits to an audience of two. I am one of them. The other is Graham Tull, co-founder of PEEX – a British startup that has built a device that lets gig-goers remix live music while it’s being performed.
Neither of us are looking towards the stage where, a day later, Shakira will perform before a crowd of 17,000. Instead, we’re looking down at our phones, fiddling with five sliders that change the prominence of instruments in the mix. I slide the guitar channel all the way up, and the biting riff in “The Bitch Is Back” rises above all the other instruments. When the chorus kicks in, I drop the guitar back down and turn Elton up, his voice cutting through everything.
Being able to mess around with live mixes isn’t just a novelty, Tull says. It’s a fix for one of the big problems with gigs: poor sound quality. “Ultimately your experience is entirely limited by your vantage point,” he says. Despite paying a small fortune for tickets, only a handful of audience members at larger venues end up standing or sitting somewhere with the best sound. Sit too close to the edges of the arena and you’ll end up hearing the ‘slapback’ of music echoing off the wall behind you. Pick the wrong point to stand in, and you could miss out on bass notes altogether or, on the opposite end of the scale, have your insides shaken loose if you find yourself in the sightline of a subwoofer.
PEEX, wants to fix these inconsistencies with a device that lets users pick their own sound mix and have that pumped into their ears while they’re listening to the concert. “It just evens the playing field,” he says. “It makes every seat in the house as good as any other.”
To achieve this, Tull has built a simple receiver that hangs around the necks of concertgoers and picks up an audio signal sent by any one of five Wi-Fi transmitters dotted around the perimeter of Amsterdam’s Ziggo Dome. This audio signal is chopped up into five channels – vocals, guitar, bass, drums and keyboards – that people can then slide up or down in their own tiny equaliser in the PEEX app, which connects via Bluetooth to the receiver. Rather than shutting out the live concert altogether, the slim earbuds let in most of the sound from the PA, so it’s almost impossible to tweak the mix so much that you ever lose an instrument entirely.
“It's basically a virtual version of a mixing desk,” says Pete Mills, head of music and events at PEEX. Before the start of a show, the company works with artists and their engineers to decide which five channels they want to show in the app, and which instruments will go into which channel. When the artists are playing live, a cable from the stage runs into a PEEX rack that can be located anywhere in the venue. This cable contains separate channels for every single microphone or other soundsource on stage – up to 192 in total – and filters them into those five pre-agreed channels.
But the physics of sound make this a little more of a technical challenge. While music piped through the receivers only takes a few tenths of a milliseconds to reach listener’s ears, sound from the PA is a little more sluggish. Sound travels at about one foot per millisecond, so someone right at the back of the Ziggo Dome would hear organic sound from the PA hundreds of milliseconds after the piped-in sound from the receiver. Without a fix, all PEEX users would hear everything twice – first through their earbuds, and then from the PA in the room.
To get around this problem, each receiver is listening out for a unique sonic fingerprint that lets the device sync with the sound in the room. The PEEX system constantly analyses sound running through the PA and turns minute sections of audio into fingerprints that it sends, along with the five channels, to the receivers. Tiny mics on the receivers then listen every half a second for that fingerprint, and when they detect it, can use that match to sync up the earbud audio with the live sound.
And it works. When I tried out the system in the Ziggo Dome, the sound was noticeably cleaner and crisper when I had my earbuds in. Of course, an empty arena is never going to have the best acoustics and I wasn’t listening to a live band – but the app gave just enough control over the mix to make things interesting without being distracting. Even though I was wearing earbuds, enough background noise comes through that you can only really tell you’re listening through the receiver when you turn a channel all the way up.
This, Tull says, is kind of the point. “We’re not giving you so much freedom that you could screw it up,” he says. “You can’t ruin it.” Although plugging in a pair of earbuds at a concert might seem like it’d take you out of the moment, Tull argues that it actually gives listeners more of a connection with the live music.
Read more: Inside the race to create an AI-powered virtual Elton John
Elton John, it seems, agrees. Having tested the technology with Elton on tour and at his Las Vegas residency over the last couple of years, from September he will be taking the PEEX system to audiences on every date of his 300-show farewell tour. People will have a few different options if they want to try it out, from buying a device outright – Tull says it won’t cost “much more” than the price of a good concert ticket – to renting one for a single concert.
Of course, for many people, the prospect of plugging into a pair of headphones and twiddling with an app during a gig might prove more of a detraction from the live experience than something that would intensify it. But for those who are intent on getting the perfect sound, PEEX could end up being a decent way to squeeze a little more value out of every concert ticket.
And Tull is hoping that once they've left the gig, instead of dropping £20 on a t-shirt, these discerning fans will opt to buy a recording of the show as a memento. Since the PEEX system captures all the audio that comes from the stage, creating a live recording of every show is a cinch. “The best connection you can have to a great night out with that artist is a recording of the show you were at,” he says.
Although Tull already has partnerships with other big artists in the pipeline, he knows that the device won’t be for everyone. Artists that rely heavily on samples or backing tracks, for example, might not get much out of PEEX, even though the system will work for them just fine. Really, Tull says, this technology is all about live bands – whether that’s Elton John selling out a 17,000-seater arena or a covers band playing in a village pub. “Live music should be about live musicians creating the sound there and then, and the more of that that’s happening, the more we’re there to support that.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
