Resonant Presences and Future Spatiality: Sculptural Sound and Critical Immersion Studies for Hybrid Sonic Societies

[Gerriet Krishna Sharma]

ONE. The Expanded Field of Presence

Extended reality is no longer a horizon to come; it is already shaping the conditions of our perception. XR unfolds as a hybrid sonic space, where multiple agencies and overlapping realities converge, producing environments that compel us to reconsider how we listen, how we share presence, and how we coexist. In such spaces, immersion is not simply a technical affordance but a field of tension, where different perceptions of world are negotiated in real time.

The central conceit of immersive audio has long been predicated on the notion of plausibility—the idea that auditory cues and their spatial reproduction can approximate an objective world. Yet this objectified real world is an abstraction: an idealised construct, and, perhaps, a contingent narrative we mistake for reality.

Most developments in spatial and immersive audio, whether through Ambisonics, Wave Field Synthesis, or Dolby Atmos, are directed by technological priorities: by signal modelling, physical simulation, and reproduction fidelity. Far less often are they driven by aesthetic inquiry, by perceptual complexity, or by the creative potentials these systems hold.

Spatial sound today has become part of everyday experience. Through our headphones, our audiovisual devices, and computer architectures, we navigate an acoustic ecology that is no longer merely physical. As McArthur and colleagues write: “Our symbiotic absorption of mediated realities means we soon incorporate them into an updated range of realism.” Sound that is composed is sound that is aesthetic; it is experienced. And the designed sonic world rapidly becomes our new normal.

TWO. The Technological Sublime and Its Discontents

Virtual reality and spatial audio technologies have ushered in a new paradigm in the fields of home entertainment, games, music, architecture and sound art. These media extend our capacities to design and compose beyond the physically perceivable world. They invite us into spaces where time and space themselves become materials: elastic, relational, and performative. But this expansion also destabilises disciplinary boundaries: composition, design, architecture, and performance collapse into one another, demanding a post-disciplinary understanding of experience.

In this context, the artistic researcher frequently finds themselves in productive conflict with the engineer. The latter may strive for the fixation of auditory objects and coordinates in a Euclidean space, for spatial accuracy and signal purity. The artist, however, seeks to understand what is triggered, what spectrum of perception is produced, and which spatial categories exist for and within the listening experience.

Between these poles emerges what we might call Shared Perceptual Space: a dynamic field in which scientific models, compositional practices, and audience perception coexist, interact, and reshape one another. It is through such exchanges that the sculptural, phenomenological qualities of sound can unfold, no longer as static projections of data into a room, but as living material that mediates presence, bodies, and environments.

THREE. Immersive Living, Isolated Listening

The future of spatial sound is not confined to art, entertainment, and academia. With the projected decrease in average living space in urban areas, hyper-realistic spatial audio solutions are being designed to create the illusion of larger rooms, or to block unwanted environmental noise. These systems promise psychological and acoustic well-being, and their proliferation will likely turn personalised 3D audio bubbles into standard features of daily life. The result is an increasingly private form of immersion that blurs comfort with isolation.

We must recognise that technologies and labour practices reshape perception, absorbing subjects into attentive regimes of production and consumption. Therefore, the act of isolating our ears through spatial audio may no longer appear as rebellion or entertainment, but as survival. In this light, immersion becomes an existential necessity, a method of coping with the demands of modern or post-modern or even post-human life. Yet it also raises urgent epistemological questions:

How do we expand our perceptual and conceptual frameworks to encompass these drifting, hybrid, and fluid spatial phenomena?

What happens when immersion becomes both a refuge and a mechanism of control?

FOUR. Space as Cultural Construction

We have never before confronted a collective, networked, and externally defined design of (spatial) perception on this scale. Concepts of space and spatiality are how we construct the world—and how we intervene in it. The question thus arises:

What do we really share with our audiences, with engineers and scientists working within these media spaces?

How can we still detect aesthetic potential within these systems and make it meaningful for the sonic arts?

Today, space has become a privileged term across philosophy, art, and geography.

But why space, and why now?

After centuries of theorising time, the turn toward space reveals deeper political and economic logics. Space is the domain of control: of organising, promoting, annexing, and defending territories whether material, virtual, or cognitive. The enthronement of space as a total paradigm thus reaffirms ancient power dynamics, even as deterritorialisation renders them fluid. Within this regime, spatialisation—the synthesis of spatial properties of sound—emerges not only as artistic method but also as a form of governance.

Spatial audio technologies, now embedded in gaming, streaming, consumer electronics, and architecture, mark a profound phenomenological shift. As they become more accessible, they reconfigure our bodily and mental habits. The question is no longer only how we create these environments, but who creates them, for whom, and to what end.

What can artists, composers, and architects contribute that is distinct—what strategies might lead to alternative futures of listening and cohabitation?

FIVE. From Fidelity to Friction—the Field of Critical Immersion

To speak of immersion is to speak of power, seduction, and surrender. Within the discourses of virtual reality, 3D-audio, and other immersive media, immersion is frequently articulated through the concept of presence: the phenomenological sense of being there within a mediated environment.

Presence functions as both an experiential goal and an epistemological problem: Presence names the affective and cognitive processes through which users come to inhabit a space that is perceptually coherent yet ontologically unstable. However, immersion cannot be reduced to the technical achievement of fidelity. The term itself—lately borrowed from gaming and media studies—too often conflates the condition of being absorbed with that of being surrounded.

High-fidelity systems may reproduce spatial or sensory environments with increasing precision, but they cannot by themselves produce immersion. To replicate the world is not to make it felt. Immersion arises instead from the interpretative and affective negotiations that occur within the medium’s affordances and constraints; its gaps, thresholds, and instabilities. Presence, in this sense, is not transmitted by technology but continually co-constructed by the participant and the system.

Immersion is ultimately personal, irreducible to the specifications of the technology that enables it. And yet, the marketing apparatus surrounding immersive media constantly sells it as total experience, as a creative industry spectacle, as innovation. Against this, we must insist on critical immersion, a mode of engagement that foregrounds the medium’s failures, fissures, and frictions.

To be immersed critically is to be aware of the frame that contains us.

Art has always depended on such frames. It provokes without harm, constructs worlds that are real but not real.

Yet with the rise of concept art, performance art, and artistic research, those protective boundaries blur. However, they are referenced.

Immersion’s laws—absorption, believability, coherence—begin to clash with art’s peaceful desire for rupture, estrangement, and doubt.

This incompatibility is productive, though: it opens a space where immersion can be questioned from within.

What happens, then, when immersion fails or produces unexpected, even paradoxical results—when sound and image fall out of sync, when the illusion fractures?

What we often label defectiveness might instead signal an aesthetic opportunity. The fissure becomes a site of heightened attention. Within that disjunctionbetween the audible and the visible, between here and elsewhere, between inside and outside immersion gives way to reflection. It is in this interval that new narrative and perceptual strategies can emerge.

Can VR or AR, with their demand for seamless illusion, sustain such productive instability? Could we imagine a terrain of defectiveness—an art that inhabits the glitches of the immersive apparatus itself?

SIX. Towards an Art of Immersion

Art does not operate as a campaign, nor does it necessarily share the market’s immersive ambitions. Yet it cannot stand apart from them. Sound and music have become structural parameters of contemporary experience; forms through which ideology, affect, and attention are organized.

The artist’s engagement with technology, then, is less a matter of tech-fascination than of inquiry: a process of discovering the limits of perception, of turning tools into instruments, and instruments into perceptual antennas. To say that technology is “neither good nor bad” is insufficient. Technologies are oriented toward certain users, intentions, and worldviews. The question is who explores them, and to what end.

Are artists still contributing to alternative world perceptions, or merely participating in the immersive campaigns of corporate culture?

As composers and sound artists, we must confront immersion’s paradox: it defines the contemporary media condition, yet only occurs when the medium disappears. There is no simple dichotomy between critical distance and immersion. Rather, the tension between them—this thin line, this oscillation—is where art can operate most meaningfully. A genuine art of immersion would not seek total absorption, but would stage the transition between worlds—the border between in and out, between belief and doubt.

Virtual acoustics, like film in its manipulation of time, now renders space itself malleable. The creation of n-dimensional spaces is no longer speculative; it is a daily practice. But with each layer of simulation, the everyday shifts. We no longer alter virtual reality; we alter reality through the virtual. Our task, therefore, is not to reject these tools, but to mis-use them. To embrace clichés in order to subvert them. To become experts in non-clichés.

Let us professionalise amateurism in VR. Let us design for friction, for instability, for failure. Let us compose not songs or tracks, but sonic spatial models—articulations of sound-space relations that resist commodification. Background and foreground, left-right trajectories, spectromorphologies, spatiomorphologies, sculpturalities—these are not mere techniques but spatial strategies, ways of thinking and inhabiting.

The border between worlds—the thin, imperceptible layer—can be circumscribed and tested. We can make it porous, vulnerable, and audible. By exposing the membrane of the Sphere, we emancipate it. The original always emerges outside the product, unrealistic to the last, and yet stubbornly real.

Gilles Deleuze once stated: “It is not a case of worrying or hoping for the best, but of finding new weapons.” Perhaps the artist’s task today is to identify these weapons, not to wield them blindly, but to unmask their entanglements, to force them into consciousness through artistic action.

SEVEN. Epilogue: Resonant Societies

The future will not be a seamless soundscape and hopefully, there will be more than 6 degrees of freedom. It will be a complex, contested ecology of resonant presences—hybrid sonic societies negotiating coexistence across physical, virtual, and collective spaces.

Immersion will not save us; but it may teach us how to listen differently.

To study immersion critically is to reframe it as a social, perceptual, and ethical field; a site where aesthetics meets agency. It is to recognise sound as sculptural force: mediating between co-existing worlds, shaping new spatialities, and forging shared perceptual futures.

These are not merely artistic ambitions. They are questions of cultural survival: how we inhabit, how we perceive, how we imagine being together. In the end, what we compose are not just sounds or music, but modes of coexistence.

Will Schrimshaw: Ambience and Immersion in the Domestic Sphere

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Stefan Weinzierl: Acoustic Immersion–Understanding and Measturement Concepts

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Jacqueline Waldock: Rethinking Immersion Through Everyday Sonic Practices

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Dugal McKinnon: Ecologising Immersion

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Angela McArthur: lunch break immersion: how to feel like you feel when you don’t feel

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Gerriet Krishna Sharma: Resonant Presences and Future Spatiality: Sculpural Sound and Critical Immersion Studies for Hybrid Sonic Societies //  New Version Workshop TU Berlin

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Holger Schulze: Claim

Daniel Burkhardt & Gerriet Krishna Sharma: Rauschen & Brausen I, 2007

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Binderiya Amgalan: #00BFFF, 2026

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Christoffer Schöne: Rysum 1457, 2026