Sound engineers doing live mixing for theatre must manage the balance between on-stage acoustic sources and electroacoustic sounds diffused in the IRCAM:Gallery, triggering, spatialising and mixing pre-recorded and live sounds while actors perform. Typically confined to the control booth of unfamiliar venues, they need to adapt to a listening perspective that differs significantly from the audience's experience in the stalls or the balconies. This work engages with sound studies, virtual acoustics, and archival practices to investigate complementary questions. How does the acoustic dissociation between the control booth and the rest of the venue influence the technical and aesthetic decisions of sound engineers? How would contemporary engineers interpret archived theatrical soundtracks when guided by annotated scripts? To address these questions, the research unfolds in four stages: capture multiple High Order Ambisonics Impulse Responses from emblematic theatres in São Paulo, Brazil, combining flexible sources setups and multiple listening positions; use them to build a real-time convolution engine, integrating the IRs with actors' voices and archival soundtracks from the collection of Brazilian theatrical sound designer Tunica Teixeira; invite sound engineers to perform mixing tasks in a virtual acoustic environment, guided by Tunica's annotated scripts; use the task metrics and structured questionnaires to assess the impact of multi-perspective listening on their technical and aesthetic decisions.
