Sonosphere @ Confluences

Orbe designed and implemented Sonosphere for the Confluence museum that opened at the end of 2014 in Lyon. Sonosphere is an immersive sound experience deployed indoor and outdoor. The visitor navigates through the voices that inhabit the areas of the museum with a mobile device. Sonosphere at the Confluence museum allows the visitor to explore the sound memory of the museum, to discover spaces behind the scenes, and to access other hidden dimensions.

As part of the CoSiMa project, Sonosphere integrates 3D-sound technologies provided by IRCAM. Visitors are solicited by spatialized voices that seem to come from the art pieces, columns or walls. HRTF filtering enables spatial localization of sound sources. The visitors are continuously geolocated through a Bluetooth LE beacon network that equips the 20,000 m² of the museum, and we use the smartphone inertial sensors to get an idea of the orientation of the visitors within the space. Display free mode allows the visitors to navigate with their ears. This intuitive interface is close to natural listening and thus requires no learning.

With this geolocation and binaural sound processing, Sonosphere adds a sound layer to the museum spaces. The sounds no longer belong to the headphones, but are truly part of the environment.