Case Study - High School Theatre

Written by Chris Webb

Our theatre space at school is a two storey 1960’s construction space with a lot of concrete. It’s a fantastic space for performing arts, but not a great space for listening. High ceilings, hard surfaces and few soft furnishings make listening hard work.

I went to help out a teacher turn on captions for a movie that was being shown in class, and I questioned why we were not able to connect the student’s remote microphone to the computer. After some asking around, and for support from our Itinerant Specialist, we were told that we could indeed plug it in, but this was the end of the conversation that I was involved in. The Pandemic struck and other things became a priority.

Fast forward 18 months, and a student mentioned that they didn’t have much access to assemblies that were held in that space. Knowing that we could plug in the remote microphone, we tried this out. Our mixer (a Behringer X32 ) is digital, and allows us to create custom outputs using any of the inputs, therefore allowing us to output just what our students with hearing loss need.

Plugging in the remote microphone worked, but it only allowed our students to benefit, and not our parents, staff, and other visitors to the space, who don’t necessarily have expensive Roger receivers to connect to a remote microphone. We started to talk with our equipment supplier and we were advised to explore a WiFi based assistive listening system. At the same time, we installed 6 hanging microphones above the stage to amplify the voice on the stage during a drama performance. Getting nerdy for a minute, this caused a whole new challenge as it requires so much cabling. We used XLR to Ethercon adapters to allow us to transmit the sound via a single shielded ethernet cable, instead of multiple XLR cables. Ok, back to the regular programming.

Listen Technologies kindly loaned us a WiFi Assistive Listening unit to try out for our winter play, which proved to be a success. It was easy to connect, use and promote. The students who tried it out liked it, and we found that connecting it to a phone was fairly easy. The students who had bluetooth devices could stream from their phones directly, others could use their remote microphones, or personal remote mic. Now we were able to provide a clear and direct stream right to the listener. We ordered a unit and had it installed.

The Listen Everywhere Unit from Listen Technologies

While providing an audio stream is part of the challenge, this only gives access to some of the sounds and spoken language. To make listening easier, and to ensure that everyone has access we wanted to provide captioning -making use of two TVs that had been installed during the Pandemic to overcome issues with the positioning of our projector screen. This is still an ongoing challenge, and one that we need to overcome. However, we have found that automatic captioning works well provided we are able to identify who is talking and when. We also have the ability to choose the display to send the captions to, to move them closer to a particular student or group, or to display them for all.

We’ve done a lot of work in making this space more accessible, from flexible captions, assistive listening and more. However, there is still far more to be done, and this is just the start of an adventure in assistive listening, not the end.