I knew this was going to happen. The very next day after posting a list of all the ways that sound is taking over our lives, from podcasts to voice controlled assistants, I come across another new innovation to add to that ever growing list: Immersive Audio; a way to add artificial sounds to your environment that appear so life-like, you won’t be able to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s infused into your environment. Perfect for creating authentic AR/VR experiences and other forms of creative entertainment.
Protocol details what the new trend is all about:
“Darkfield Radio,” [is] a shelter-in-place-friendly immersive theater production that cleverly uses 360-degree audio to set the scene. It makes use of sounds from objects everyone has in their home, like the buzzing of a refrigerator or a knock on a door, to blur the lines between storytelling and reality. The play is the work of Darkfield, a group that has been putting on in-person immersive theater experiences in the U.K. and beyond for five years.
‘All our work has relied on creating a doubt in the audiences’ mind about what is real and what is imagined,’ explained Darkfield’s artistic director, David Rosenberg, via email. ‘The immersive sound is so convincing it is often difficult to tell for sure if the banging on the door is happening in the recording or in your house.'”
But that’s not all. A couple of months ago Darkfield ran another online Immersive Audio experience called Double that turned your home into a Sci-Fi dystopia while you supposedly switched places with your listening partner. A trippy, out of body experience that would have been impossible to pull off if not for this amazing new technology.
Here’s what The Guardian had to say about Double at the time:
“This is supposed to be a controlled space, a safe space,” says Christopher Brett Bailey at the start of Double, and he’s right. We are not in some unfamiliar theater, like the shipping container where Darkfield has conducted similar audio experiments, but in our own kitchen. We’re meant to feel protected here, so it’s all the more alarming when the play sets you on edge. It’s as if your very home has been transformed.
This is how it works. You and a companion download a smartphone app. At the appointed hour, you sit opposite each other over the kitchen table and put on headphones. Instructed to close your eyes, you have an intense 20-minute sound experience that has the immersive quality of Simon McBurney’s The Encounter. At one point I’m convinced Brett Bailey is not just whispering in my ear but leaning on my shoulder.
The scenario itself is a piece of sci-fi daftness inspired by the medical condition known as the Capgras delusion. You’re supposed to believe your listening partner is a double, a body-swap replica. Even after all these months of lockdown, that’s a fanciful proposition.
What is not fanciful is the aural picture it creates around you. Performed with due gothic seriousness, it gets under your skin by sounding so real. The radio and the kettle could be yours, the fly truly does seem to circle your head – and isn’t that your glass that just smashed?
Most online theatre struggles to get beyond the screen, to be present in the way live performance is present. By turning your house into a stage, this one, fleetingly, becomes a doppelganger for the real thing.”
Since we can’t go to the theater right now bringing the theater to us has a certain appeal to it. Especially if the experiences are going to be this mind-blowingly awesome while offering true immersion. It just doesn’t get any better than that.
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