How can movement become how we listen?
Overview
TRAVERSE is a platform for spatial audio experiences that makes listening physical. Pairing smartphones with listening devices enhanced with augmented reality (AR) technology, Traverse enables listeners to move through sound. Be on stage, walk up to the members of the band, or explore another world’s landscape—from wherever you are.
Winner of the SXSW 2019 Award: Special Jury Recognition – The Future of Experience
The Brief
A recording is a fixed object. With stereo, and even surround sound, the mix plays the same way regardless of where you are. The way a soundscape shifts as you move through it has never survived the process of recording. Bose built hardware to change that: AR audio embedded in consumer glasses and headsets, with motion sensors that anchor sound to physical space. They handed the hardware prototypes and a new SDK to Superbright and Vrai with one question: what could this actually become?
The Approach
Superbright and Vrai ran deep R&D on the possible experiences, stress-testing what opens up when movement and location become part of the grammar of a piece — when the listener’s position is an instrument. Traverse emerged as a platform for spatial audio: a framework for taking multichannel recordings and expanding them into navigable environments.
The Experience
Traverse premiered at SXSW 2019, won the festival’s Special Jury Recognition for the Future of Experience, and continued to Sonar and beyond. Paired with Bose Frames or QC35 II headphones, the app reads head position in real time. The first release launched with two experiences: the multitrack recordings of Elvis Presley’s From Elvis in Memphis, spatially reconstructed so you can move through the band as they recorded it, and “The Arm of InSight,” placing the listener inside NASA’s InSight Mars lander deployment on the Martian surface.
From Elvis in Memphis
On the 50th anniversary of From Elvis in Memphis, Traverse opens the multitrack recordings of “Suspicious Minds” and “Power of My Love” into spatial environments. The same recordings heard for fifty years — now navigable. Walk toward the singer, drift back toward the drums, move closer to the booth where the engineer is riding the faders. The mix responds to your position in real time.
The Arm of InSight
NASA’s InSight lander has been gathering data on Martian geology since 2018 — seismometer, heat probe, weather sensors reading a planet no human has touched. Traverse puts you at the moment of deployment, using the mission’s own publicly released audio and imagery to reconstruct the surface. Mission Control audio is your guide. The planet’s silence is the atmosphere. You are the lander.
Project Credits & Information
- Project type
- Immersive
- Partner
- Bose
- Agency
- Superbright, Vrai Pictures
- Role
- Production
- Credits
- Partners: Vrai Pictures, Superbright. Director: Jessica Brillhart. Sound design: Antfood. Creative developer: Superbright. Technical director: Igal Nassima. Producer: Erica Newman. Lead engineer: Nate Turley. Engineer: Prashast Thapan. UX director: Daniel Perlin. Sr. UX designer: Kaori Ogawa. Project manager: Maximilian Lauter. Art direction: The Combination Rule.
- Website
- Traverse
- Date
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