The reporter Mike Murphy, who is in charge of technology for Quartz, wrote on Twitter: «For work I happen to experiment so many new technologies, and it is rare that I am completely struck by something really new. With Mixhalo it happened, and I think it will change the way we participate in live events. “
Mixhalo is an app, developed by a startup of the same name, made to allow those who participate in a event – for now mainly musical, but possibly also of another type – of having a better and “more immersive” experience. In the case of a concert, Mixhalo asks viewers to connect to the app and put on headphones, giving them the ability to hear the music as the person playing it on stage hears it, and also to decide how to hear that music.
One of the founders of Mixhalo is Mike Einziger, guitarist of Incubus, an alternative metal group whose most famous song is “Drive”, which was released in 1999 and whose chorus says “Whatever tomorrow brings / I ' ll be there, I'll be there “. Murphy wrote that he tried Mixhalo for the first time at an Incubus concert in New York, along with all the other spectators, and that he had “a live music experience like never before”.
With Mixhalo I could hear the mix of the musicians coming directly from the stage, in the same way they heard it. I could choose whether to listen to a specific mix, moving between the parts with the guitars or excluding the channel with the voice of singer Brandon Boyd I could turn the volume up or down and jump from channel to channel as, when and as much as I wanted. I was in the audience, in a side sector, but it was as if Incubus were playing their own and only for me. I could really understand what Boyd was singing and hear the drums distinctly.
With Mixhalo, Murphy wrote, it no longer matters where you are while attending the concert or where that concert is held. has poor acoustics: “Wherever you are, you can have perfect sound.” Marc Ruxin, the company's chief executive, told Venues Now: “We are really trying to democratize music: we want every place to be the best possible place.” Ruxin compared what Mixhalo wants to do to live music with what high definition did to television images: “Consumers have been enjoying low definition for decades, until something better came along: TV with HD is more beautiful, and music with Mixhalo sounds better ». Although it may be understandable that this possibility excites those who are a musician for a living, it is not certain that ordinary people will have the same reaction with respect to the possibility of using an app during a concert and – in the midst of the great confusion – devote themselves to regulating volumes and choose tracks. All this, however, at a live music concert to be listened to only through headphones, and with the mediation of a smartphone.
Perhaps also for this reason, Mixhalo does not want to deal only with music: its app can also be used when attending a sporting event (to hear news or interact in various ways with what you are seeing), at a conference (for example to hear the translation in real time of that that someone is saying in a foreign language) or even at the theater.
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What's next for MIXhalo…. Even the best theaters sometimes have dead zones where it's hard to hear. Ever been to a play or musical and struggled to understand the dialogue? Tell us about it! ???
Despite this, for now, music remains the main interest of Mixhalo, which not surprisingly was founded by Einziger and his wife Ann Marie Calhoun, a well-known violinist, famous among other things for her collaborations with the composer Hans Zimmer. Einziger explained to Quartz that he was one of the first musicians to use, around 2000, special headphones – the in-ear monitors – that allowed him to hear, while playing, only the sounds coming from the stage, i.e. excluding all the rest. noises. He then began to think that it was strange that “from the stage one had a completely different auditory experience from that of those in the audience”.
Einziger said that the “true epiphany” came to him in the 2016, when at rehearsals in view of a Grammy performance he made a guest listen to how the musician who played it from the stage felt, a privilege that is usually given to a few people: to use Einziger's words, only to “Girlfriend of the frontman.”
Taking advantage of a little knowledge that he had gained while studying at Harvard about ten years earlier, during a hiatus from the Incubus, Einziger then got in touch with a few people who, looking at the issue from a technological point of view, assured him that what he had in mind could be done. Einziger also said he had a kind of blessing from Elon Musk, who became interested in the project even before it left and who told him: “If you can do it, it will change things.”
The easy part was developing an app. The hard part – as anyone who has tried the internet at a concert knows – was making sure that the sounds could reach every viewer in real time and in excellent quality.
Without getting too technical, Mixhalo exploits what Tech Radar calls “a private wi-fi network”. Whenever at a concert you want to have the audience use Mixhalo, you must first install a set of antennas capable of transmitting all the audio channels that are recorded on stage. Before the concert, spectators must then download the app, equip themselves with headphones or earphones and then connect to the private wi-fi network created by the Mixhalo antennas. It is a particular type of wi-fi network specially developed by Mixhalo, which however, as Quartz writes, “on closer inspection looks a lot like a radio signal”.
According to Simpson, the local signal of Mixhalo it works so well that, as happens with the radio signal, “the first person who connects will have the same experience as the ten thousandth”. In the case of a normal wi-fi signal there is a constant exchange of data sent and received, because “when we listen to a song on Spotify, the network needs to know where we are and if we are moving”. With Mixhalo, on the other hand, there is almost only data going to the connected devices. Some data still needs to be sent from smartphones, because Mixhalo needs to know where a viewer is, so that the audio arrives at the exact moment they would hear it if they weren't wearing headphones.
Simpson said she was convinced, speaking with Quartz, that Mixhalo is ready to support dozens of audio channels during the same concert and that technically it could also manage up to 150 different channels, many more than those of a philharmonic orchestra. More than the number of channels, at the moment the price discriminant that Mixhalo asks of those who want to use its technology at their events is the size of the area: the bigger it is, the more antennas are needed to ensure a good signal for everyone. But Simpson says that, anyway, setting up the antennas is not a more complicated process in itself than those needed to set up the lights or speakers for that same concert.
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all this tech coming to a headphone near you! #MIXhalo
For now, no orchestra has used Mixhalo, but among those who have experimented with the app – generally with satisfactory results and various appreciations – there have been Aerosmith and Metallica. Mixhalo also recently signed a future partnership with the Staples Center in Los Angeles, which hosts hundreds of events a year, including Lakers basketball games and Kings ice hockey games.
Regarding the possible extra-musical evolutions of Mixhalo, the company remains rather vague, but it is clear that an app downloaded by most of the participants in the same event can satisfy different needs. The simplest things are the commentary and the communication via app of information, data and statistics in real time. But theoretically an app like Mixhalo can be used to survey in real time (perhaps during a conference) or – in the case of sporting events – to place bets. Another important aspect concerns safety: Mixhalo could in fact be used to send important messages or warnings to all viewers.
also I got to experience this @IncubusBand show from an amazing vantage point, as one of @ mixhalo's founders is @MichaelEinziger, the guitarist in the band pic.twitter.com/gLuzgX3gQF
— Mike Murphy (@mcwm) November 16, 2019
