Gareth Owen is a twelve-time Tony & Olivier award-winning / nominated[1]Broadway and West Endsound designer, described as one of "the only behind-the-scenes creatives whose star wattage spells success on [theatrical] productions".[2]
Owens theatre career began when he was invited to mix the musical The Blues Brothers which was running at what is now the Trafalgar Studios in Londonswest end. About this time, Owen is quoted as saying "I didn't have a lot of money so I bought a tent and lived in the band's garden".[11] From here he was offered a job as sound designer for the UK tour of Stephen Schwartz' musical Godspell,[12] beginning a collaboration which would continue until the present day.[13] Owen went on to design a number of shows in a freelance capacity, before joining London's Orbital Sound as a full-time sound designer.[14] In late 2009, Owen left Orbital Sound and formed his own company, Gareth Owen Sound.[15]
Sixteen-time Grammy winning artiste Alicia Keys with Broadway sound designer Gareth Owen at the first preview of Key's Hell's Kitchen on Broadway.
Discussing acoustic volume of shows in a 2024 LSI Magazine interview, entitled "Making Broadway Rock", Owen, captioned as "Broadway's King of Pop" says "[in the theatre], when people say they want things loud, they don't mean Bon Jovi in Wembley Stadium loud."[41] He follows up on this in another article in FOH Magazine saying "In my experience when people talk about things being loud, they don’t necessarily mean it’s too loud. They mean that certain frequencies are aggressive and painful. In my experience, you can actually make things quite loud if you keep control of the sound, if it rises in volume in a relatively uniform, relatively linear manner. If all the frequencies rise together, it doesn’t become screechy or aggressive or punchy.”[42]
Owen's creative ethos has been discussed at length in multiple interviews, however the most succinct summation of his design philosophy reads “The traditional music theatre sound for a long time was about pretending that sound didn’t exist. It was all about microphones hidden in the hair, the sound of the orchestra coming out of the orchestra pit and voices coming from the people onstage. A ‘good’ sound design was considered to be one you wouldn’t know was there. Today, people go to the movies, hear an orchestra swell around them and they feel it. They put in their AirPods and hear amazing sound, get in their car and hear 29 speakers, or spend $600 at Target on an amazing surround system for their front room—and yet we still go to a theatre and pretend like sound doesn’t exist! I realised, ‘No, the world’s moved on. I’m going to stop apologising for sound.’ I made a conscious decision to take it in a completely different direction, which is a cinematic sound design - so I don’t really do shows that sound like traditional Broadway shows; that’s not really my thing.” [43]
With regard to immersive audio, Owen says, "It’s not a new concept, but it is a new buzzword. We are theatre people, and we’ve been doing what I call immersive audio for decades: putting people in the middle of the sound; and finding ways of localising sound sources from the audience’s perspective. That is theatre sound design..."[44]
Owen is also listed as the sound designer and original creative for the London Palladium Christmas Pantomime from its inception in 2016 through until 2021.
Sound designer Gareth Owen and comedianLee Evans during Barking in Essex rehearsals in London in 2013.
Owen has worked as sound designer on the following West End straight plays in London, although the timeline suggests he is no longer active in this particular discipline:
Over the course of the decade from 2004 to 2014, Owen designed many of the musicals and plays at Off-West End theatre, The Menier Chocolate Factory in London.[50]
Owen is also listed as the sound designer for the 2006 Menier production of Sunday in the Park with George[51] but he does not include this production on any listed resume or biography.
Owen is credited with a long list of technical achievements and industry firsts.
Despite being quoted as saying that immersive audio "is not a new concept, but it is a new buzzword",[44] Owen is considered to be a pioneer in the field of immersive theatre sound. Owen was the first person to use the object basedwave field synthesis immersive audio in both Londons West End[52] and on New Yorks Broadway,[53] for the musicals Come from Away and Diana, respectively. He created the world's first sound design to incorporate object based mixing in to a rotating auditorium[54] for Andrew Lloyd WebbersCinderella musical at the Gillian Lynne Theatre in London; and what was, at the time, the largest SoundScape installation in the world[55] for arena musical Starlight Express. Owen is also credited as the first person to integrate wireless tracking of performers in to an object based sound system on Broadway,[56] this time for MJ the Musical. Indeed, he and his team are credited with creating one of the industry standard control applications for live immersive audio,[57] d&b's EnSnap,[58] used on multiple shows and productions around the world.[59]
Owen's use and development of cutting-edge technologies is not limited to immersive audio. He is believed to have designed the show with the largest number of radio mics ever used on a west end musical,[60]42nd Street at Londons Drury Lane. He was the first person to use the d&b KSL line array system[61] on both a Broadway show and on a west end musical, in both cases for Back to the Future the musical. He was the first person to use the d&b XSL line array system on a Broadway show, this time for & Juliet at the Sondheim theater. Owen was the first person to use a DiGiCo mixing console in theatre,[62] the now defunct D5, for the UK Tour of the Cliff Richard musical Summer Holiday.[63] He is credited as being the first to use both the Avid Venue mixing console[64] and the Avid S6L mixing console in theatre, for the shows Annie Get Your Gun and Broadways Come From Away respectively. Owen was one of the early adopters of computer game audio engines to create dynamic sound effects in theatre, notably on Broadway's Back to the Future musical.[65]
Business ventures
The Fourier Audio transform.engine at the NAMM trade show in Los Angeles.
Owen is co-founder and CCO of audio hardware manufacturer Fourier Audio,[66] where he is "working to redefine the future of pro audio".[67] In 2023, he and his co-founders Henry Harrod and Peter Bridgman sold Fourier Audio to live mixing desk manufacturer DiGiCo for an undisclosed multi-million pound sum.[68] From this springboard they went on to release the transform.engine, a revolutionary VST plugin host, designed exclusively for the live environment,[69] which won the PLASAInnovation Award.[70]
Owen is also a co-founder of the software house Show Control Ltd, a company specialising in the coding and development of dedicated theatrical show control systems.[71] There is little information available regarding this endeavour beyond a list of the developed software on Owen's website.[72]
Other endeavours
Honorary Doctorate at Salford University
In 2009, Owen joined a steering committee that eventually formed the Association of Sound Designers[73] where he served as a committee member for the maximum term of five years, from 2012 to 2018.[74]
