I recently purchased an $80 SYMA X5C1 after seeing some of my fellow crewmembers playing with some quadcopters during the 2014 nutcracker run. I’ve always been fascinated with RC airplanes and helicopters but the quadcopter put me over the edge. I’m officially hooked! Way better than a video game. 3 dimensional flight.
What do quadcopters have to with audio? On the surface nothing really.
They’re a blast to fly around a theater before doors and after the show is over. A sort of toy to release the stresses of doing theater sound design. That is probably enough right there since I rarely “relax” in my role as resident sound designer for various arts organizations. Adding a quadcopter drawer to my workbox will be a good thing.
With regards to audio purposes, I can see how in the future I will be able to use the HD video camera function on a quadcopter to collect information about flow speakers and other things that are out of reach, etc…
I fly a small PA made up of QSC KW122 speakers for some of my ballet gigs and sometimes I’m not sure how the rear settings ended up if I’m not there to fly the speakers myself. Last time I brought them back down to check. Next time I’ll fly my drone up to take a look.
More expensive drones can broadcast real time video to the RC remote. In the future we will see drones mounted with 3D laser scanners that can map an entire venue and render out a CAD drawing. This will be handy for doing acoustic models of a space with prediction software like Meyer’s MAPP.
There are already drones that can fly preprogrammed paths. These sorts of aircraft make shooting scenes for movies and videos possible where a helicopter would not work.
There is a new quadcopter option coming out that not only follows the action but can link multiple quadcopters to the same target and follow them without any piloting. This is called “swarm”.
I’m sure the entertainment world will benefit greatly from having inexpensive drones. How about a drone with a wireless measurement mic mounted to it? Near field measurements of the drivers in a line array anyone? Who knows. Once you can program something to fly around in a certain way at a certain speed and follow a predefined path, there are all sorts of possibilities. Lead singer for a rock band being filmed from 4 different angles and broadcast live via the swarm function as they fly over the audience? It will happen…