Seeing Sound
SONA – Seeing Sound is a performative audio VR installation, designed by our co-creation team. Equipped with motion capture, headphones, a microphone, and sensory shoes, you embark on an adventure of interactive 3D sound. You hear your footsteps on virtual surfaces, interact live with your blind guide, and are drawn into the thrilling story of an occupied shopping mall.
The Game: 30 Minutes in the Occupied Shopping Mall
For thirty minutes, you sneak through a pitch-black shopping mall to support a group of children in their Dadaist revolution. You can hypnotize mutated vines with your echo beam, smash flower pots to free fellow revolutionaries, and solve puzzles posed by talking supermarket products that later become ingredients for a cocktail. Throughout, you stay in contact with your guide via walkie-talkie – until the finale, when you meet face to face in a magical freezer and together attempt to short-circuit the shopping mall through a cybernetic ritual.
How the audio VR installation works
As a visitor, you’ll be equipped with headphones, a microphone, and motion tracking for your head and feet. You move freely within a darkened room measuring approximately 8 × 12 meters. Thanks to motion tracking, you’ll be able to hear the installation spatially: you can pinpoint the exact location of sound sources in the room and learn to judge distances.
The following four interactive sound design techniques structure the game:
Virtual footsteps: You hear your footsteps on virtual surfaces: on the department store’s linoleum, through the ice in the freezer, and on a reactive sound floors in the music department. The footsteps serve for spatial orientation and to activate game mechanics.
Voice: Spoken commands control the game. You tell the elevator which floor you want to go to, chat with NPCs, and call out positions to your guide in the cold storage.
Virtual walls: Distance-dependent sound design helps you orient yourself in the space. The game’s architecture becomes audible before you touch it.
Echo beam: Using a voice command, you send an acoustic beam into the virtual space and hear it collide with the architecture. This allows you to scan the environment and trigger game mechanics. The beam is modeled after echolocation, which many blind people use to navigate.
How Seeing Sound was developed
SONA emerged in 2023 from a collaboration between the blind cultural activist Adriani Botez, media artist Thomas Meckel, and composer Jakob Lorenz, who were exploring VR from an acoustic perspective. Their shared fascination with spatial sound gave rise to the idea for an audio-VR installation that works exclusively through interactive sound.
In 2024, an initial research phase began (SONA – Explorations in Sonic VR): At the Academy for Theater and Digitality in Dortmund, we developed the technical foundations and, with the support of the blind and visually impaired community, were able to create a first audio VR installation. (→ more here)
In early 2025, we began developing Seeing Sound: In worldbuilding workshops at the Cologne Association for the Blind, 19 blind and visually impaired co-creators wrote the storyline, characters, and levels. Ben Robbins’ role-playing game Microscope helped them collectively invent the game world centered around the Dadaist shopping mall. Subsequently, the co-creators recorded the characters’ voices and the sounds of the virtual world in a recording studio.
In May 2025, Seeing Sound premiered at the Sommerblut Culture Festival at Tanzfaktur Cologne. For ten days visitors were able to experience the installation, accompanied live by blind and visually impaired performers. Since then, the installation has been on tour: in 2025 at the Next Level Festival in Dortmund and at Cologne’s Un-Label Studio for Inclusive Culture.
More performances this year are in the planning stages and will be announced soon. Seeing Sound is constantly evolving through collaboration with the community.
Invite & Experience Seeing Sound
Seeing Sound can be invited to performance and theater festivals, gaming and media art events, as well as exhibitions and museums.
We require a room that can be darkened, measuring approximately 8 x 12 meters, a speaker, and dimmable lighting. We’ll bring everything else. The live performance is accompanied by a performer from the co-creation team, an assistant, and technicians.
We are happy to coordinate the specific details, duration, and number of visitors individually.
Inquiries and collaborations: info@sona-vr.com
Partners and Sponsors
SONA – Seeing Sound is a co-production of the Cologne Association for the Blind, the Sommerblut Kulturfestival, the Un-Label L.I.K. – Laboratory for Inclusive Culture, and SONA eGbR. Supported by Aktion Mensch, the Kämpgen Foundation, the Heidehof Foundation, and the Herbert Funke Foundation.
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