The Hollywood Bowl just got its biggest sound upgrade in a generation. AI is doing the heavy lifting

This is read by an automated voice.Please report any issues or inconsistencies here.

See more from the L.A.Times in Google Search.

Set us as preferred On a live concert stage, sound engineers wage a constant, mostly invisible war against noise.A kick drum bleeds into a vocal mic.

A guitar amp pollutes a monitor feed.The singer drops the mic to their chest mid-chorus and half the lyric disappears into the mix.

For decades, the tools available to fix those problems have been essentially the same: equalization, compression, volume, judgment.Human hands on a mixer, making trade-offs in real time.This summer at the Hollywood Bowl, something different is happening.

A machine learning system called Source Intelligence — developed by L’Acoustics, the French audio company that supplies the Bowl’s sound infrastructure — is listening to every microphone on stage and doing something that wasn’t possible until recently: isolating a vocalist’s voice from everything else around it, in real time, with a precision that engineers say they’ve never encountered before.The system achieves as much as 40 decibels of rejection on unwanted stage noise — a thousandfold reduction — which L’Acoustics Chief Executive Laurent Vaissié says is roughly 20 decibels better than any competing technology on the market.The practical effect, according to Fred Vogler, who has been the Bowl’s principal sound designer since 2003, is startling.

“Suddenly, you’re not getting the guitar amp or the drums in that mic,” he said.“You’re just getting the vocal.”Source Intelligence is one piece of a sweeping audio overhaul at the Hollywood Bowl this season — the venue’s most ambitious upgrade in a generation — that also includes a new flagship L Series line array system and a first-of-its-kind immersive surround installation that may be the largest of its kind anywhere in the world.The centerpiece of the overhaul is the L1, L’Acoustics’ new flagship line ar...