Room Number 8

An exclusive immersive experiential event

We were approached by Vogue magazine to help create an immersive experience which told the stories of the ways the Ritz has gone above and beyond over the years to create excelling service and experiences for their customers. 

In collaboration with video artist Bernardo Varela, we brought together a large team of sound designers, musicians and composers to create a fifteen minute interactive live performance using a bespoke 3D audio speaker system. From forests, underwater turtles, to the Icelandic howling winds we created a series of hyper real immersive sound beds which an audience of six would sit amongst at a time, together experiencing live acting, dancing and fine dining whilst enclosed in a projection mapped and synchronised shape shifting room.

There was a lot of pieces to this puzzle. To start with we had to work to try and articulate the scenes and spaces these stories would be told in. Bernardo and Karl then started to explore how the room would be built and designed, where people would sit, how actors would move in and out of the scenes. It was a good crash course in immersive theatre direction!
One of the extra take aways from the project is that we developed our own set of in house 3D spatialisation tools for more radical and experimental audio spatialisation. We needed a 3D audio system that could work and be triggered in realtime to a performance, so we built plugins using Max4Live and Ableton Live using a video sync and projection mapping tool called Millumin. 
Together with the main performance room, we installed a custom built modular synthesiser that played back generative sound patches based on some of the sound design work we'd created for the performance. This allowed the audience to interact and experience some of the sound and work gone into the project using a custom iPad control interface.