Immersed is an audio-visual performance piece created by Justin Gray.  There are visuals but the raison d’etre of the piece is recorded music.  The whole thing was written to be recorded and then played back using Dolby ATMOS to create a three dimensional moving soundscape.  I got to experience it on Saturday night in the TD Music hall at Massey Hall which has a thirty eight speaker array for doing just this kind of thing.  It was playing as part of Luminato.

There were thirty eight musicians involved in the project…

The music is in several movements; using different combinations of instruments plus some vocals and blending influences from jazz, western classical and Indian classical traditions.  Thirty eight  musicians were involved including several who seem to pop up in a surprising number of experimental settings like Drew Jurecka, Rebekah Wolkstein and Suba Sankaran!

The recording process was pretty complex.  Sections had to be recored separately so that a 3D image of that bit could be created; i.e. each section had to have it’s own font, back, sides, top and bottom.  The these “sound cubes” were mixed to create the final product; which of course is also a “sound cube”.

It’s an interesting experience.  It’s like being in the centre of a moving spherical orchestra in which the different bits are moving in different ways.  Maybe one could imagine it as like one of those classical Greek models of an Earth centred universe with the planets etc on different spheres around it (except, see below, it still has a “front”).  The metaphors here are my best attempt to summarize what I learnt during a really helpful pre-show chat with Justin; for which I’m most grateful.

As for the music itself I liked some bits more than others.  There was some fine playing but a lot of drum kit which is not my favourite thing.  I guess it felt more like jazz than anything else as there were quite a few extended and involved solos in the mix.  The visuals were a combination of external scenes and video made during the recording sessions.  I get why they are there but they do reinforce a kind of spatial hierarchy; they are the “privileged” front.  That said, I guess there has to be one because most playback. situations will not be spatially agnostic.  There’s going to be a Blu-ray release and all but the fanciest home AV set ups have a distinct “front”. My own set up has three speakers at the front and one at the back with one either side for example.  So I guess the mix has to reflect that.

Experiencing Justin’s piece i was struck by how far we have come in recording technology since, say, 1960, when John Culshaw and Walter Legge were developing incredible ways of creating sound worlds with, basically, a crossed pair of mikes.  It’s a long way from there to the sort of “microphone trees” that were used to record the components of Immersed.I find it exciting that such potential exists and a bit depressing that, despite the possibilities, most recordings today are consumed as relatively low fidelity MP3 files!  Such is life.

I’ll be curious to play around with the Blu-ray if I can get my paws on a copy.