Designing space and place in auditory virtual environments

It is practice-based artistic research that combines electroacoustic composition, storytelling, and field recording with the use of Extended-Reality (XR) technologies to examine these themes in context. A portfolio of works, together with this text, are the outcome of a creative and conceptual investigation, in addition to a developed framework which can be used for the creation and presentation of new spatial works.

The immersive audio framework is the culmination of the compositional strategies and feature sets explored in the pieces of the portfolio. The works are designed for multiple listeners in a shared experience, where each listener, based on their tracked position and rotation in space, wirelessly receive an individually binaurally decoded sonic perspective via open back headphones. The sounds presented in open-back headphones are combined with a periphonic loudspeaker array to form a hybrid listening system. <br><br>The research responds to the recent rapid evolution and accessibility of XR technology, as well as the increasing ubiquity of immersive spatial experiences, and seeks to explore compositional methods that achieve a semantic connection between the sounds and the strategies employed for their spatialisation.