City of Floating Sounds - a symphonic journey through the city
by Echoes Labs
location: various, globally
project type: bespoke mobile app
client: Factory International
About
City of Floating Sounds is an immersive musical journey that takes you out into the city streets. Explore the streets and listen to the stems of Huang Ruo's meditative new work grow and expand around you as you move through the city.
City of Floating Sounds uses cutting-edge app technology to take classical music out of the concert hall and into the urban landscape. As you get closer to the performance venue – and other audience members – the sound expands, revealing more parts of the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra's performance. The path you take and who you meet can all change what you hear.
Your journey culminates in a live performance of the symphony at the concert venue, where you'll hear the full score come to life in an immersive concert experience. Each route offers a unique sonic adventure that blends Huang Ruo's distinctive fusion of Chinese folk and Western avant-garde music with the sounds of the city itself.
Created by composer Huang Ruo, creative technologist Josh Kopeček from Echoes, and Factory International, this walking experience reimagines how we connect with both music and our urban surroundings. Open your senses to the city - what will you hear and who might you meet?
➔ Factory International website
➔ Guardian article on the work
Our role
As Creative Technologist and founder of ECHOES, we developed the complex technical infrastructure that makes City of Floating Sounds possible. The project presented two major technological challenges that pushed the boundaries of what's achievable with mobile audio experiences.
First, we created a mass synchronisation system that allows hundreds of concert-goers to play Huang Ruo's symphony fragments in perfect sync across their personal devices, without any pairing or tethering required. This meant solving the enormous logistical challenge of ensuring that anyone could download the app and immediately join the synchronized performance, regardless of their device type or technical knowledge.
Second, we built a live heatmap system that shows the real-time locations of other participants, creating an interactive and gamified layer to the musical experience. As audience members move closer to each other through Manchester's streets, the app reveals more layers of the orchestral score, turning proximity into a collaborative musical instrument.
The result transforms concert-goers from passive listeners into active performers, where "the concert goer is given the opportunity to play their part in the performance, creating agency for the listener and breaking boundaries in classical music performance." This culminates in the live BBC Philharmonic Orchestra performance at Aviva Studios, where the digital and acoustic worlds unite.
Working through our ECHOES platform for walking sound art and spatial audio, we delivered a robust, scalable solution that's now touring internationally from Manchester to New York's Lincoln Center, London's Southbank Centre, New Haven and beyond.
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