“He who works with his hands is a laborer.
He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.
He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.”
Francis of Assisi
This quote adapts perfectly to Giuseppe Zingali. The Zingali Omniray Theatre is a masterpiece. Giuseppe’s great and clearly insane idea is coming to life. I consider him as a melomaniac, someone with a strong passion for music and its “proper” playback. The Theatre is his creature and represents how to close in a project that summarizes Zingali’s impulses and yearnings of his professional activity in the last thirty years.
We are talking of a theatre/auditorium of 600 sm. The stage is about 100 sm and the parterre can host about 350 people. It can also be used as a recording studio. In fact, at the entrance, a mixing desk dominates the room. There are no chairs, but I suppose they can be provided depending on the event. This is the second time I come here, and I am very impressed.
I am not a technician, but I know very well how a recording studio is. I can therefore state that all the fundamental manufacturing parameters to realize such a structure have been thoroughly applied, starting from the acoustic isolation. The materials have been selected with care, together with a perfect design of doors, acoustic viewers, walls and false-walls, air-conditioning and wiring. For the acoustic treatment in the room are covering in wood, panels of leather and thick curtains with red and dark green nuances. The effect is a uniform frequency response that can be perceived by clapping the hands from different positions, with a strong feeling of balance between absorption and diffusion, stage included. I am quite sure of a great work on the RT60 reverberation time that, for a studio, should be between 0,3 and 0,6 seconds. RT60 is the unit of measure of the reverberation time. The term refers to the time required to lose the signal of 60 dB with respect of the physical characteristics of the room.
It is a design into a design. The room has been created to host artists while recording their performances in live take. At the same time, to offer the opportunity to record albums in a unique environmental and acoustical contest. With or without audience. The theater becomes a symbolism: the relationship between live music and playback. The aim is promoting, through the take, an easy interchange between performance and record, based on an absolute identity. In brief, the playback music becomes a parameter of the live music. The design sees the playback music as a cultural fact and the quality of the take as a cultural object to be preserved and diffused. Here the technical/qualitative and the sociological aspects of the recording emerge. The take can be considered as the musical interpretation of the text, a technological substitute of an ancient musical praxis: the concert with its extraordinary cultural identity.
The proposal of Zingali’s design is epochal: to convey the attention of the user towards the consequential branching of the take. We can sum them up in the creation and development of new musical genres, in the development of new listening modes and related technologies and, last but not least, in the development of a listening culture shared by a society. The recording becomes therefore a “statement”. Just think of the importance that the technology have had in defining unwritten music like jazz or ethnic.
The Zingali Omniray Theatre will allow, to the lucky musicians that will go there, to record their own music at the top of the collective emotionality, overtaking the inconveniences of the hypnotic, stressing and uselessly perfectionistic practice of the studio take, which often is nothing but dry sessions. The enthusiast, on the other hand, can enjoys few hours of good live music in an ideal environment and maybe close with famous artists.
We are looking forward to hearing the announcement of the inauguration. ReMusic will be there as a special testimony.
For further info: to Zingali Acoustics website
