While the first part of CREW’s Tremens XR performance was made in an artisanal manner, I wanted the second part to be the opposite: completely high-tech, interactive and spatial.

I had been postponing a deeper exploration of this for a while. It is difficult to push the technical boundaries of visuals, interaction and sound all at once. By then, CREW’s visual pipeline had matured, which created some space to develop the 3D sound.

VR is a great platform for this, as you know where the person’s head is and, in our case, they are wearing headphones.

After some initial experiments, I landed on Steam Audio, a toolkit developed by the well-known game developer and store owner Valve. It is state-of-the-art stuff: you can create a 3D environment with walls and materials of varying reflectivity, resulting in a complete reconstruction of an acoustic space.

I did the first tests in the dark, without visuals. You could hear the timbre change when doors opened, things like that.

I combined this with reverberation impulse responses recorded in swimming pools, interactive splashing sounds, and soundscapes I recorded in ambisonics. For simplicity, all the sounds were integrated into Unreal Engine’s native audio system.

The result is an extremely dynamic and spatial soundscape, much more neutral and ethereal than Part 1, so as not to overwhelm the audience during the interactive section of Tremens.