Resonant Rooms: Audience-responsive sculptural sound for festivals and live events
Project partners: University of the West of England (UWE), Copper Sounds, Undershed (Watershed Arts Trust)
A project led by UWE is developing an audience-responsive spatial audio system for festivals and live events.
The team will develop and test an immersive sculptural sound work by experimental artists Copper Sounds, building on their earlier work ‘Collective Resonance’, and explore how audiences respond to it.
Visitors enter a space of resonant plates, metal sculptures that act as speakers. As they move through the room, they experience a slowly evolving soundscape that responds to the presence and movement of people, and of objects within the space.
With no headsets, controllers or gestures to learn, audiences become part of the composition simply by being in the space together. The system has potential applications across public live event settings where individually instrumenting a crowd is impractical.
The prototype will be developed across two deliberately different settings. At UWE’s Immersive Studio, part of The Bridge Studios, the team will create and publicly showcase a version using larger sculptures and high-precision motion capture, and test whether the studio’s surround sound system adds to the sculptures’ own sound. At Undershed, Watershed’s immersive gallery in central Bristol, the team will test a portable version using smaller sculptures and low-cost cameras to sense audience presence and clustering.
Feedback from audiences in both settings will show how the experience changes between a research studio and a public gallery, informing how Copper Sounds take the work on tour.
The Undershed team will work with Copper Sounds on how the installation can reach different groups of people, drawing on Undershed’s experience of presenting immersive work to public audiences. This could include BSL interpretation and an artist-led audio description. The project will also produce a practical workflow for artists and venues, documented and shared openly, including what worked, what didn’t and why, so that others can build on it.
The Resonant Rooms project is one of two university-led projects awarded funding from the XR Network+ Future Live Fan Experiences R&D challenge to develop the next wave of live fan experience across music, sport and cultural events.
Photograph by Benedict Gaster / The Bridge Studios, UWE Bristol: Sonny Lightfoot of Copper Sounds with a resonant plate during testing in the Immersive Studio at The Bridge Studios, UWE Bristol.
Categories: Live events, Research, Technology