Immersive

From the time spent inside by some of Australia’s most notorious criminals to the anecdotes and lived experiences of thousands of people over several generations; the National Trust hosts explorative tours that will immerse you in a shared history of unsettling truths.

Spatial Audio for VR – 4×8 minute episodes

Four episodes, written by Ryan Griffen and Nayuka Gorrie, are set in a world after death known as The Between.  The series follows the unfolding of an incident that could change the course of the after-life as we know it.

Each episode is told from a different character’s perspective and has the potential to be experienced from different vantage points, allowing the audience to build their own picture of the characters, the world, and the story.

The series has been created entirely in the VR painting and animation app, Quill, with industry leading artists Zoe Roellin and Lea Peirano onboard to help execute Ryan’s vision.

Changemakers celebrates the activists, icons and allies behind 120 years of women’s rights in Australia.   

Australian women were the first in the world to achieve both the right to vote and to stand for election. Yet they still faced inequality at home, in the workplace and in society.  

Six voices working to make change. Music and stories about art, representation, and shaping the future.

Kait celebrates the strong women in her family.
Sara shows others they aren’t alone.
Amy takes unsolicited advice and makes art.
Deyi wants women to have a seat at the table.
Matthew is tired of being complacent.
Chiara is making the future she wants to live in.
Zoya expresses identity and feminism through her writing.
Georgie is honest about the fight to be herself.

Untitled (Giran) by Jonathan Jones includes roughly 2,000 separate sculptures of six types of tool, each made from a different material. Each tool embodies the knowledge passed down through generations and represents the potential for change. Unison Sound was commissioned to produce a forty-eight-channel soundscape to accompany the visually striking installation. Language and breath are delicately woven together, pushed and pulled around the forty-eight-channel soundscape, firmly underpinning the installations sense of movement. Location recordings were gathered on Wiradjuri land, and served as the foundation for the soundscape. Natural rhythms found within these recordings then became the blueprint for additional sound design.

The Waltzing Matilda Centre was a multi-sensory art installation in the centre of the re-developed Waltzing Matilda Museum. Unison Sound designed the storytelling and ambient soundscape, with five sound pieces playing to animations on the following themes: Waltzing Matilda, Drought, Rains, Opals, Budgerigars. The Billabong gives the audience an experience of natural phenomenon that occurs in the landscape displaying events that are phenomenal, although rare, and portray the essence of the Waltzing Matilda country and the inspiration for the writing of the song.

The Rome: City and Empire exhibition from the British Museum (touring to the National Museum of Australia in September 2018) explores the stories of Rome and its’ vast Empire which continue to captivate and intrigue people almost three thousand years after their foundation. Unison’s aim was to ensure that audio tours had an immersive feel, and contain sound effects and/or music related to the object/s at each stop. It is expected that the audio tours may contain a range of voice talent, possibly with a primary narrator and other secondary character voices. Ideally the script should be written such that each stop is connected to the next and a continuous narrative is created across the exhibition. 

80Hz is an interactive sound pavilion created by artist Thomas Wing-Evans in collaboration with the State Library of New South Wales’ DX Lab and Unison Sound. This unique experience allows viewers to explore the sonification of 44 paintings from the State Libraries archives. This project uses cutting edge technology designed to take meta-data from the paintings, and transform them into forty-four mesmerising soundscapes. Unison’s challenge was to find a way to build a generative sonic composition using streams of meta-data such as size, contrast, medium, complexity, dominant colour etc. The way we achieved this was by looking at the various elements of a musical composition and finding matching data sets that could be scaled to control that element of the composition. A great deal of effort was focused on creating these sets of rules or ‘filters’, so that once completed, each painting could generate it’s own composition unspoilt by human efforts to infuse emotion or meaning. 

Unison Sound worked alongside Jonathon Jones to design 8 outdoor soundscapes using recordings of indigenous NSW language groups. The movements of passers-by triggered these voices as they explored an installation of 10,000 ceramic shields placed in the Royal Botanic Garden. The project required various levels of concept development in collaboration with the artist, Kaldor Public Art Projects staff, historians and hardware providers. To edit Indigenous language recordings and design looping sound pieces for an outdoor, public listening environment. 

Unison Sound worked with Kaldor Public Art Projects and the studio of internationally acclaimed artist Anri Sala to source and test audio hardware for contemporary art installation The Last Resort. The set-up was capable of recording, mixing, and the playback of audio for 38 channels. Sala’s project transformed the Observatory Hill Rotunda, a site with expansive views from the most elevated point in the city. Audiences were invited to step beneath a gravity-defying ensemble of custom-built drums to experience their rhythmic, live response to a contemporary interpretation of a Mozart Concerto.   Photo: Pedro Greig

Unison Sound designed a multi-channel soundscape for the Australian War Memorial’s re-developed First World War Gallery.  Unison’s Luke Mynott worked closely with the Executive Producer Luscious International, and the Memorial’s curatorial team to develop concept designs and turn them into a clear creative brief for the soundscapes. Unison Sound also proposed a speaker layout floor plan and audio playback system in consultation with the Australian War Memorial AV department, exhibition designer and hardware provider. This was designed to meet the best-in-class standards of pre-existing components while being sensitive to the visual design of the exhibition space and providing Unison Sound with the flexibility to meet the creative brief.