The sonic dimension of the Metaverse
If there is one aspect of metaverse design I have not seen anyone write about, it is the sonic dimension and how the conscious integration of soundscapes into virtual worlds can radically amplify our experiences and sense of place within them.
Ever since an early age I have loved both creating music and experimenting with sound. As a teen in the 80s I had a ZX Spectrum computer, SpecDum, Cheetah Marketing’s drum machine peripheral SpecDrum designed by musicians Alan Pateman and Peter Hennig, and a Casio CZ-1000 synthesizer which I would push to their limits.
I had a broad interest in indie and synth rock and pop, as well as exploring artists such as Vangelis, Jean Michelle Jarre and Can. Later I would buy myself a Roland EG-101 groove keyboard which came with an inbuilt D-Beam motion detector, a hugely fun way to control the shape and texture of sounds through waving your hand above it. This would allow me the freedom to really experiment with richly textured sweeps and pans.
In my late 20s and early 30s I would continue to search for the type of music I was aiming to compose. One ambient artist and composer I discovered was Michael Sterns, who describes music in the following way:
“Music emerged from the people of Earth in an integrated holistic way. It came from the fabric of all aspects of life, from birth through death, the space between, acknowledgement of ancestors and the world we live in.
As individuals, cultures and as a species, music is a carrier for the “stories” that we tell ourselves. Through these “stories”, we continually re-create our lives and the unconscious patterns that have been handed down to us through the generations.
Music can also provide an immersive context to lose oneself in, to lose one’s sense of separation. It can open doorways into what it means to be human beyond our personal, cultural and historic definitions, carrying the listener/participant on a flight of becoming.”
The album I love the best is Within — The Nine Dimensions. This YouTube video has three songs from it, providing an excellent introduction to Stern’s style and creativity.
As he explains:
Several of the pieces feature ambient recordings made at worldwide locations, including underwater in Roatan, ceremony in Bali and with the Mara Masai in Kenya. On other pieces he recorded bells and singing bowls gathered from different traditions by artist Paul Abell. These were the same bells he had used throughout the soundtrack to “Baraka”.
One project I was really interested in when living in Yorkshire in 2006 was the sonic henge project. The hugely innovative idea was to create a “sound-scaping stage” at the Thornborough Henges using 13 different sound channels, allowing for a uniquely experienced sound. The inspiration was based on the possibility that Britain’s ancient stone henges had spiritually resonant qualities, which the sonic henge aimed to replicate through sound immersion.
The ambient track can still be heard here. The project is a beautiful illustration of the concept of sense of place, where design is used to help develop people’s sense of belonging to a specific location, community and natural environment.
Of course many other artists have created 360 degree immersive sound installations. One that I particularly enjoyed was Janet Cardiff’s The Forty Part Motet which comprises of forty individually-recorded voices of the Salisbury Choir performing sixteenth century Tallis’ Spem in Alium through forty high-fidelity speakers.
This was one of the centrepiece exhibits of When All is Quiet, a curated collection by Kaiser Chiefs at York Art Gallery, in which the band explored the boundaries between art and music in a unique and experimental manner.
As the exhibition explained:
Using their position as pop musicians as a starting point, Kaiser Chiefs chose to rethink sound as a medium, inviting visitors to join them in exploring the edges between music, art, creation and performance.
To do this, they brought together works by internationally regarded sound artists which have resonated with the band while on their travels and inspired them to look at sound in new ways.
The band selected The Forty Part Motet because of its relevance to how they hear their own music while performing — ‘an all encompassing space of sound’.
Another immersive installation that I loved was Doug Aitken’s ‘sonic pavilion’ at Instituto Inhotim in Brazil, which has built a number of different art galleries and installations within their botanical gardens.
As the art gallery explains:
Inaugurated in 2009, the gallery is the result of a five-year process around the research, design, and construction of the work Sonic Pavilion, developed from the experience of artist Doug Aitken at Instituto Inhotim. In the center of the space lays a 202 meters deep hole, where a set of microphones are installed to capture the sounds of the earth. Transmitted in real-time, the noise occupies the whole space. The gallery’s glass walls are covered by a filter that makes the landscape of valleys and mountains sharp when seen from the front, and diffuse when observed from any other angle.
This is an incredible installation, blending a deep connection with the hidden worlds beneath our feet with a sensitive appreciation of how our visual experience of the local landscape can integrate into our experience.
In addition to my interest in music and ambient soundscapes, while studying psychology at Nottingham University I started to become interested in meditation for wellbeing, discovering a number of practitioners who were creating audio tapes with slightly differing presentations in the left and right ear.
One person’s recordings who I found particularly power was Nick Kemp, whose Adventures in Well Being Now utilises a mixture of ambient music, hypnotic trance and richly metaphoric language (partly inspired by Milton Erickson’s work) for his hypnotic narratives creating a bi-aural experience which induces a deeply relaxed state.
I wanted to provide this wide-ranging exploration of soundscapes and the notion of immersive audio experience to highlight the way in which the metaverse has primarily been presented a virtual visual and three dimensional experience. While virtual reality technology and design has improved hugely since it’s initial developments in the 80s and 90s, the same cannot be said for the evolution of audio experiences.
Many households no longer have a hi-fi, and much of the way we consume music (I use this word deliberately) is via our smart phones’ speakers and mini-headphones. I did go through a phase of building an extremely hi-fidelity system and nowadays really miss the richness, depth and breath that comes from listening through the highest quality equipment.
The irony is that since the 80s when I was experimenting with low fi drum machines and non-programmable synths, even the most basic music software that comes as standard with Macs for example is mind-blowing, including artificial intelligence based drum machine programming and digital guitar pedals that would cost thousands of pounds to buy were they purchased as physical products.
Our relationship with music was revolutionised by the music video once it had found the right channel, the first one being MTV. I can see a new revolution emerging based on the development of new sonic adventures in the multiverse. For this to happen, new partnerships will be formed based on multi-disciplinary artists, designers, practitioners and performers coming together to do something original, new, surprising and deep.
While virtual no current metaverse propositions have filled me with any degree of excitement, I do feel that if we look for inspiration in unexpected places, we can reach an elevated level of metaverse design that can deliver truly transformative experiences. This particularly includes designing audio metaverses for those with visual impairments.
When we consider the sonic dimension of the metaverse, we discover new artistic and design avenues to explore which can have very real applications, such as how we can rethink the concept of virtual museums, how we can explore the rich tapestry of indigenous languages, or how we can explore historical music catalogues using creative navigational metaphors that are not necessarily anchored in simple 3-dimensional spaces such as rooms, buildings and towns.
The key question designers need to consider is how can the sonic dimension enhance the metaverse experience, and what is the impact on navigation, discovery and the meaning we discover on our virtual journeys?
As we emphasise in our books Customer Experiences with Soul and Deep Tech and the Amplified Organisation, executive leaders need to consider the role that artistic consciousness plays in their design and innovation initiatives. Now that brands are swarming into the metaverse space, designers with this level of artistic consciousness that includes both sonic as well as visual dimensions will needed more than ever before.
