Sonic Sphere Lab Sessions

Visitors to Sonic Sphere stand and dance with their hands in the air. Behind them, the fabric of the sphere glows with a white light. — Sonic Sphere, The Shed, New York, June 16 – July 30, 2023. Photo: Ahad Subzwari.

About this program

Join members of the Sonic Sphere collective and their collaborators for a pop-up laboratory session inside the sphere. Each session’s surprise program will vary. You may experience anything from dance and intellectual debate to experimental music, soundscapes, and more.

The Sonic Sphere collective’s process of innovation and iteration is driven by this experimental methodology. In these spontaneous sessions, the seeds of tomorrow’s great art are born. Expect community, mischief, and brilliance.

Sonic Sphere is a collective above all, a laboratory of the senses. To give shape to their experiments they collaborate with artists on how to write original work for Sonic Sphere. They remix, deconstruct, and render existing works from the widest spectrum of genres into the spatial forma while trying to invent ever-developing tools to interact with, create for, and experience the sphere.

In this session, the Sonic Sphere team will showcase some of their classic experiments and spatializations and engage participants in an interactive dialogue on the challenges and opportunities posed by working in a spherical format.

With Merijn Royaards, Sonic Sphere Co-Founder and Creative Director

This session reimagines the age-old tradition of sharing stories in a circle by taking the audience through a live, three-dimensional journey of words. As original pieces by four poets weave their tapestry of sound and metaphor, the audience will be enveloped in a shared moment of narrative immersion and connection.

Poets Danielle Bero, Lauren Ducrey, Kyle Studstill, and Cea (Constantine Jones) invite you into the heartbreaking idiosyncrasies of personal experience that lead straight to the universal heartbeat that sits at the center of every story. Where poems say out loud what we all feel down low.

With music by Spencer Handley

Madame Gandhi, along with her long-term collaborator, the producer and educator Atropolis, will present experimental live soundscapes from Antarctica and the forest. After presenting their work, they’ll engage in a discussion on the use of music and sound to create empathy.

Take a tour through the voice traditions of the world with ethnomusicologist, musician, and technologist Spencer Handley.

Composer Raquel Acevedo Klein and sound artist Joe Mardin will present original works.

Polyphonic Interlace by Raquel Acevedo Klein

Polyphonic Interlace is a multilayered, surround-sound music experience made entirely of the composer’s voice. Inspired by the Renaissance motet Spem In Alium by Thomas Tallis, Acevedo Klein composed and recorded each layer of the piece in order to emulate the sound of a large chorus and symphony using her solo voice, during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown. The music that emanates from the house and ancillary speakers transforms into a sonic tapestry, aiming to unite people through music.

Noises In My Head by Joe Mardin

The excerpted scenes featured in this presentation for Sonic Sphere are from the play, Noises In My Head, with sound design and music by Joe Mardin. Written by Turkish playwright Beliz Güçbilmez, the English-language version of Noises In My Head was originally produced at the Theater for the New City in the fall of 2022 and was directed by Manfred Bormann. The production featured actress Defne Halman, who voices the pieces in this presentation.

On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to land on the moon. Join the Sonic Sphere team this July 20 for a preview of the first party on the moon, due to take place around 2031. The experiential journey begins with immersive audio of the Apollo 11 launch by Merijn Royaards and then incorporates an imagined dinner, fireworks, and dance (in specially adapted low-gravity dance music from beatboxer and percussionist J. Stone alongside singer Serena Grace). Over the course of this immersive preview of the actual first party on the moon, after which you will subsequently feel as if you have in fact partied on the moon, you’ll also hear original 3-D music from Ivy Fu and Tony Grund, topped off with spoken word poetry from 15th-century poet John Milton.

The sound design for Diminished Doorways follows a melodic thread including field recordings taken in doorways, over thresholds, and in various environments, inviting the listener to follow along and render the details of air quality, temperature, and scale in the mind’s eye. The sound design punctuates and supports an inquisitive melody, which is sometimes fragile and demure and at other times imposing. With a melodic theme initially conceived by Stephon Alexander and Donald Harrison.

Enter the music, join the composition, and throw your own ecstatic howl into the massed chorus of voices as the air trembles in song.

Composer Rolfe Kent conducts an experience combining specially composed 360-degree music within Sonic Sphere with choral audience participation to create a sonic medley that resonates through your mind and body. Each session is designed for your input and uses detailed mixes layered with deep dimensional backbeats that rock the dome as you are guided into stunning harmony by Kent. Enchanting, captivating, and wholly unique, this participatory experience is not to be missed.

Electronic music duo FOSS (Romain Collin and Jeremy Loucas) has created a bespoke show for Sonic Sphere’s lights and surround-sound system. With tape machines and tape loops, live sampling, modular synthesizers, and vocals, their music blends songwriting with ambient experimental soundscapes.

Participants

A white man in a black tshirt with a graphic depicting three people dressed all in white looks to his left while working a DJ booth. He wears headphones over his ears.

Merijn Royaards

An Indian American woman seen slightly from below looking at us raises her hands above her head toward the green leaves of a fruit bearing tree. It is night and she is lit with a soft yellow glow. She has long wavy brown hair and wears a white voluminous shirt whose arms fall down to her elbows as she lifts her hands.

Madame Gandhi

Ivy Fu

A white woman with curly brown hair falling below her shoulders looks at us contentendly while holding a guitar up at her side. She wears a silk vest with a shimmering deep brown and orange pattern. Behind her a wall is lit in purple and orange light.

Serena Grace

A white man smiles from behind a large metal percussion instrument that looks like a wok turned upside down. His hands are suspended over it as he drums on it. He wears a gray tshirt, smiles at us, and has a beard with a clean shaven head. Behind his head hangs a gong that surrounds his head like a halo.

J. Stone

Merijn Royaards is a sound architect, researcher, and performer guided by convoluted movements through music, art, and spatial studies. The interaction between space and sound in cities with a history/present of conflict has been a recurring theme in his multimedia works to date. His 2020 awarded doctoral thesis explores the state-altering effects of sound, space, and movement from the Russian avant-garde to today’s clubs and raves. He is one part of a critical-essay film practice with artist-researcher Henrietta Williams and teaches sound design for film and installation art at the Bartlett School of Architecture.

Danielle Bero was born in Queens to hippie parents, and given a dose of Shel Silverstein, Tupac, jazz, and classic rock. Bero is a Posse scholar, taught in Indonesia on a Fulbright scholarship, and co-founded a school for students in foster care. She holds a master’s in English education, educational leadership and completed her MFA at the University of San Francisco. She’s won slam competitions including Nuyorican Poets Café, Bowery Poetry Club, Ubud Writers festival. Bero is a Jack Straw Fellow, SAS festival poetry winner, and is published in the Divine Feminist anthology as well as lit mags. She recently began working on films and wrote and directed a short film Fruit Loops.

Lauren Ducrey is a poet, student of mindfulness, and senior UX content strategist at Google. When she’s not designing more emotionally supportive chatbots, she’s on a mission to break poetry out of its ivory tower as an accessible means to support everyone’s wellbeing. She published her first book of poetry Tongues Tied in November 2021 and released Cordes sensibles, an EP of poetry and music, in May 2022. Her words are also featured in mindfulness apps Minderful and Rogalife to massage your brain into heightened states of aliveness.

Dr. Adam Falkner (he/him) is a poet and musician, educator, and race and equity strategist. His work focuses on intersectional themes of race, gender, queer life, and social justice education. He is the author of The Willies (winner of the 2021 Midwestern Independent Book Award and a 2021 Foreword Reviews Gold Medal) and Adoption (winner of the Diode Editions Chapbook Award), and his writing has been featured on programming for HBO, in the Guardian, the New York Times, and elsewhere. He has toured the United States as a guest artist, lecturer, and trainer, and was the featured performer at President Obama’s Grassroots Ball at the 2009 Presidential Inauguration.

Spencer Handley is a musician, ethnomusicologist, educator, and technologist. As a fully nomadic ethnomusicologist, his studies have brought him all over the world and steeped him in the folk music traditions of Brazil, Argentina, Ireland, Spain, Nepal, Appalachia, and the Indigenous music of the Northern Amazon. With a background as an engineer and product leader, he helped build the artist funding platform Patreon.com and currently runs a music education company called Sonora, which builds mastery paths for musicians.

Constantine Jones is a Greek American thingmaker raised in Tennessee and housed in Brooklyn. They are the coordinator of the Visual AIDS Oral History Project, THE BODY AS AN ARCHIVE, as well as a member of the collective, What Would An HIV Doula Do?. They are the author of the novella IN STILL ROOMS (The Operating System, 2020) and a collaborative chapbook with Portuguese visual artist Vicente Sampaio, BALEEN: A POEM IN TWELVE DAYS (Ursus Americanus, 2022). Their work has been performed or exhibited across NYC and Tennessee. You can find them at StoriesAndNoise.com.

Kyle Studstill is a Brooklyn-based performance poet and word artist. His work is about finding deep humility, about reckoning with our own vivid and terrifying self-awareness, and about being better humans in a more-than-human world. His story-driven writing has been appeared in Monocle Magazine, CreativeMornings, and Fast Company. His word art has been featured by NYC street art pillars Up Magazine, Sour Mouse, and 188 Allen. His performance poetry has been featured by the Poetry Brothel, Inspired Word NYC, and the New York City Poetry Festival.

Madame Gandhi is an award-winning artist and activist known for her uplifting, percussive electronic music and positive message about gender liberation and personal power. She began producing music in 2015, after her story running the London Marathon free-bleeding to combat menstrual stigma went viral around the world. She has been listed as Forbes 30 Under 30 in Music, and her 2020 TED Talk about conscious music consumption has been viewed over a million times. “Waiting For Me,” shot in Mumbai, India, won the Music Video Jury Award at SXSW Film Festival in 2021 and her 100% Organically Sourced x Sound MANA nature sound pack won the New Wav award at the 2021 Splice Awards. Her third studio album, Vibrations, was released in 2022, following the release of her previous albums Voices (2016) and Visions (2019). In June of 2022, Gandhi completed a masters in music science and technology at Stanford University’s CCRMA where she spent time in Antarctica sampling the sounds of glaciers melting to create empathy and awareness around climate change.

Adam Partridge a.k.a. Atropolis from Sound MANA, has been producing, performing, and mixing with Ableton Live for over 15 years. With releases on various international labels, licensed commercials, and scored art installations featured in the Queens Museum and The Shed, Atropolis has also taught Ableton Live for 10 years, with extensive experience teaching novice to Grammy Award–winning artists.

Spencer Handley is a musician, ethnomusicologist, educator, and technologist. He runs a music education company called Sonora, which helps intermediate instrumentalists reach a high level of musical fluency using a hybrid of cutting-edge learning technology and world-class mentorship. As a fully nomadic ethnomusicologist, his studies have brought him all over the world and steeped him in the folk music traditions of Brazil, Argentina, Ireland, Spain, Nepal, Appalachia, and the Indigenous music of the Northern Amazon.

Named by the Washington Post as a “classical composer and performer to watch in 2022,” conductor, vocalist, instrumentalist, and visual artist Raquel Acevedo Klein has been described as a “force to be reckoned with” (Washington Post). Her career has taken her onstage at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Radio City Music Hall, and The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. Conducting credits include the New York Philharmonic, Roomful of Teeth, and New Jersey Symphony Orchestra. Vocal performance and recording highlights include engagements with Caroline Shaw, Glen Hansard, Alicia Keys, John Legend, Bon Iver, The National, Philip Glass, Nico Muhly, and Bryce Dessner.

Music producer, composer, engineer, musician and singer, Joe Mardin is excited to be presenting music and sound design from Noises In My Head in Sonic Sphere’s Lab Sessions and to be among its illustrious participants. Some of the artists Mardin has worked with include Chaka Khan, Jewel, Raul Midon, Aretha Franklin, Elliott Sharp’s Terraplane, and Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino.

Recent releases include co-producing and mixing An Exquisite Moment for Emmy Award–winning composer Joel Goodman and orchestral arrangements for A-ha’s latest album and film True North. Mardin also released Fairytales Interrupted, an album of his electronic compositions and plans to release his second album under his own name this year.

Ivy Fu is a sound artist, curator, and a researcher of surveillance, eavesdropping, and sensory spaces currently studying under Ash Fure and Cesar Alvarez. Using improvisational movements, generative visuals, anti-communicative technology, and homemade circuits in conjunction, she creates intelligent systems, sentient machines, and self-regenerative ecospheres that provide fugitive spaces for identity in crisis, territories that are sonically transgressed, and complex historic and personal narratives that desires to be further examined. She’s curious as to how sound oscillates in between mediums and has collaborated with museum professionals, visual artists, poets, filmmakers, and winemakers to explore the potentiality of transdisciplinary vibrations.

Serena Grace is a genre-bending, multidimensional artist. A true Siren of Soul. Her vocal range traverses a depth and breadth that is rare: from medicinal melodies inspired by her work with Indigenous elders to the sensuality and groove of R&B legends, from fire-and-brimstone grit to cosmic, ethereal highs, Grace is an undeniable force of frequency. Infusing an electric energy and palpable warmth, her performances are a sonic playground. Grace leaves audiences feeling wildly inspired through a renewed sense of awe and wonder for the transformational, healing power music.

J. Stone has been performing for over two decades as a beatbox artist, percussionist, and handpan player. He first gained notoriety as an American Idol finalist (season nine) and has continued evolving his craft to now infuse Mongolian throat singing with vocal percussion and live looping. He delights in dazzling audiences around the world from the United States to Israel and has performed with artists including Snow Raven, Run DMC, and Buffalo Springfield.

Stone loves discovering infinite possibilities of the world’s most versatile instrument: the human voice. Check out his instagram for videos and visit his website for more information.

Physicist and saxophonist, Stephon Alexander is a theoretical and computational physicist of international repute, and author whose work is at the interface between cosmology, particle physics, AI, quantum gravity, and music technology. Alexander is a specialist in the field of string theory and cosmology, where the physics of superstrings are applied to address longstanding questions in cosmology. In 2001, he co-invented the model of cosmic inflation based on string theory. In his critically acclaimed book, The Jazz of Physics, Alexander discusses ways that innovations in physics have been and can be inspired from “improvisational logic” exemplified in jazz performance and practice.

Amanda Lind is an acoustic engineer and product developer, applying physics and engineering principles to simulate and develop purpose-built multichannel acoustic devices. Her systems are primarily found on autonomous cars, improving safety, and providing directional audio communication for human-machine interaction. Prior to her current role, Lind was immersed in architectural acoustics, simulated sonic booms, and worked to document the process of tuning of steel drums by their inventor. What unites this body of work is a dedication to the study of the physics of wave propagation and consideration for the human experience.

Ever-intrigued by unexpected sounds, textures and their effects, Rolfe Kent is a creator of live musical encounters and a well-known composer for film and theater. One of the first to create work for the Sonic Sphere, Kent’s curiosity leads him to curate experiences that enchant, question, and delight.

His film work includes 70 scores including Sideways (Golden Globe–nominated score), Dexter, Legally Blonde, Mean Girls, Up in the Air, and Stan & Ollie, and in theater Forest Fables, Crimson Cabaret, and The Many Deaths of Michael Malloy.

FOSS is a New York City–based electronic powerhouse created by Grammy-nominated pianist/composer Romain Collin and electronic musician Jeremy Loucas. This innovative duo combines piano, vocals, analog, and modular synthesizers to deliver a groundbreaking audio-visual experience. Collin, described by NPR as a “visionary composer,” blurs the boundaries between piano improvisations, electronica, and film scoring. Multi-Grammy Award–winning producer Loucas captivates audiences with powerful live improvisations on modular synthesizers and drum machines. With cutting-edge performances, FOSS continues to push the boundaries of live electronic music and sound design with mesmerizing visuals.

Important Details

Running time: 60 minutes
Doors open 30 minutes before the program begins; doors close promptly at the ticketed start time, and there is no late seating.
This program includes flashing lights and strobe effects.
This program includes haze effects.
Children under six are not permitted in the sphere; children six to 14 must be accompanied by an adult.
The sphere’s listening platform is 34 feet off the ground and is reached via three flights of stairs, approximately 50 steps. A lift is available for those with accessibility needs.
In-the-round seating includes netted lounges and a netted center.
Wear flat-soled shoes.
Large bags, backpacks, and tripods are not permitted in the sphere. There is a coat check for these items on the mezzanine level of The Shed.
Be mindful of small personal items that could become loose and fall from the sphere.

Learn more about Sonic Sphere.

Go Behind-the-Scenes of Sonic Sphere

10 months ago

Innovating the Future of Music through Rapid Iteration

10 months ago

How to Build a Spherical Concert Hall

Location and dates

This event takes place in The McCourt.

July 11 – 13, 18 – 20, 25 – 27

The Shed is located at 545 West 30th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues. View The Shed on a map.

For information about accessibility and arriving at The Shed, visit our Accessibility page.

Accessibility

Entering Sonic Sphere

The listening platform is suspended 34 feet off the ground. It can be reached via three flights of stairs (approximately 50 steps) or an accessible lift.