Sound Particles
Sound Particles makes tools to work on every step of production for immersive audio content, with plug-ins ranging from synthesis to utility tools and everything in between. The underlying approach borrows directly from computer-graphics particle systems: rather than animating individual raindrops or grains of dust, thousands or even millions of small sound sources are generated and spread across a scene, then rendered together into formats such as 5.1 or Dolby Atmos to build vast, immersive soundscapes. The company's software has become a fixture of big-budget Hollywood sound design, used on productions including Dune, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Wonder Woman, Game of Thrones and Stranger Things, and Sound Particles has also partnered on Sphere Immersive Sound, the concert-grade audio system that debuted at the Sphere venue in Las Vegas.
tech specs
history
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Sound Particles began as a personal idea of Nuno Fonseca, a Portuguese computer science and music technology professor, who around 2005 noticed that the most striking visual effects in film relied on particle systems, a computer-graphics technique for generating thousands of points to simulate things like fire, smoke or dust, and wondered whether the same principle could work for sound. He started properly developing the concept in 2012, after finishing his PhD, and it gained real momentum in 2014, when a trip to that year's AES Convention in Los Angeles led to an invitation to speak at Skywalker Ranch, followed within months by talks at Warner, Universal, Fox, Sony, Paramount, Disney, Pixar, Apple and Blizzard. Sound Particles version 1.0 shipped in 2015, and the company itself, based in Leiria, Portugal, was formally founded the following year in 2016. It has since grown from that academic side project into a recognised name across film, games and live spatial audio, raising a €2.5 million seed round in 2022 to support its continued expansion.
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