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Unique project pairs cutting-edge technology and creative sound design

In the spring of 2022, fourth-year sound designer Nora Cuthbertson became the first student in the United States to tell a story utilizing only sound and exclusive cutting-edge technology.

Faculty in the School of Design and Production (D&P) had chosen her to launch the boundary-breaking Soundscapes project that scales large concert sound equipment and engineering (think Taylor Swift) to create immersive storytelling in an intimate campus setting.  

“I very much enjoyed being the first person to work with this new technology,” Cuthbertson says. “Throughout the experience I felt as though I was making my own path to the finished product, and I felt very proud of creating something independently.”

In Soundscapes, sound tells the entire story by leveraging state-of-the-art immersive sound equipment from L-Acoustics – equipment currently not available on any other college campus in the country. Professor Wade Wilson, the mastermind behind the project, explains the 24-channel immersive hyperreal sound technology. “This is object-based sound versus mixing to a single channel or speaker,” he says. “With this system, signals move individually in space. You can mix to a depth, height, anywhere. The sound takes you through a journey.”