Sound of Science: Bringing concert halls into any room

How can the acoustics of a concert hall be experienced outside the concert hall?

Together with Siemens Arts Program, we worked on Sound of Science, an immersive Mixed Reality application that makes acoustic research spatially experienceable.

The idea was to place the user’s real environment inside a virtual concert hall. Users could move freely in their physical room while seeing a representation of a real venue around them. Through handtracking, they could control their position in the hall, change the orchestra setup, and experience how these changes affect the sound.

The application started with the Salzburger Festspielhaus and was later extended with additional venues, including the Bayerische Staatsoper, a Manchester hall at Hallé, and further concert hall environments. Each venue included spatially anchored sound sources, 3D instrument representations, and multiple listening positions inside the hall. 2Sync contributed the Mixed Reality layer that connects the real room with the virtual venue. Physical objects in the user’s environment became interaction points for selecting locations, changing positions, and controlling the experience. This made the application usable for events, presentations, and guided demonstrations without requiring a fixed installation.

A key part of the project was the transition itself. Users could start in passthrough, see the real room and the person guiding them, and then watch the physical space transform into an immersive concert hall. This created a clear wow moment while keeping onboarding simple. For us, Sound of Science is a strong example of auto-adaptive Mixed Reality beyond entertainment. The project shows how spatial computing can make complex topics – such as room acoustics, orchestra placement, and architectural sound behavior – easier to understand through direct experience.Instead of explaining sound through diagrams or videos, the application lets users step into the result.Any room can become a concert hall. And every position in that hall can sound different.