Towards Critical Immersion Studies

ABSTRACT

Ambience and Immersion in the Domestic Sphere
This ‘impulse’ addresses immersion in the construction of acoustic space within the home. Immersive isolation via sound reproduction is distinguished from the production of ambient domestic interiors via ‘ambient machines.’

BIO

Will Schrimshaw is Lecturer in Popular Music Technology and Composition at the University of Sheffield. He is author of Immanence and Immersion (Bloomsbury, 2017) and numerous articles on exploratory approaches to electronic music and sound in the arts. His current research is focused on systems-based approaches to electronic music production.

ABSTRACT

Acoustic Immersion — Understanding and Measurement Concepts
This presentation provides an overview of the use of the concept of ‘immersion’ and related terms in engineering and psychology. Using virtual acoustic reality as an example, it introduces measurement concepts that explain how ‘immersion,’ ‘presence,’ ‘authenticity,’ and ‘plausibility’ can be understood and experimentally determined.

BIO

Stefan Weinzierl is head of the Audio Communication Group at the Technische Universität Berlin. With a diploma in physics and music production (Tonmeister), he received his PhD in musical acoustics. His research is focused on audio technology, virtual acoustic reality, room acoustics, and empirical musicology. He is coordinating a master program in Audio Communication and Technology at TU Berlin and has been spokesperson of several international research consortia in the fields of musicology and acoustics. He works as an acoustic consultant, mainly in the field of room acoustics for music and theater.

ABSTRACT

Rethinking Immersion Through Everyday Sonic Practices
This paper offers a provocation: that everyday sonic home-making practices, particularly those of displaced persons and migrants, challenges how we understand immersion and on whose terms. Drawing on critical geography, migration studies, and feminist sound scholarship, sonic home-making reconceptualises everyday sonic practice as simultaneously material and imaginative, embedded within power relations, and operating across multiple spatial and temporal scales. Looking through this lens forces us to question; how is immersion drawn differently depending on who is listening, where, and under what conditions? And can we develop a framework that meets these demands? A framework of immersion capable of holding together conceptual rigour with the embodied, relational, and power-sensitive dimensions of sonic experience.

BIO

Jacqueline Waldock completed her undergraduate degree and PhD in Music before developing a career in consultancy and artistic practice, specializing in community-engaged place-making. Her work has resulted in numerous publicly funded artworks and compositions that engaged communities through sonic practice. Jacqueline is a Lecturer in Music at the University of Liverpool, Faculty Impact Fellow and Co-Lead of the Arts, Mental Health and Wellbeing Theme for the Centre for Health, Arts, Society and Environment (CHASE). Her research is grounded in sound studies, with particular focus on sonic home, sound mapping, memory, and health. She has developed specialist expertise in creative and inclusive methodological approaches that bridge academic research with community engagement and artistic practice.

ABSTRACT

Ecologising Immersion This presentation offers two starting points for critical thinking and making around immersion in sound. The first is that the critical should not only involve pointing out what is problematic with current ideas of immersion and immersive practice — it must also imagine and propose other ways of doing things. Drawing on work in critical design and socially engaged art that understands imagination as a tool for change, McKinnon asks how immersive practice might model better ways of being together through sound, in place, and with the more-than-human world. The second starting point is that the assumptions shaping much of the discussion of immersion – largely those of Western, industrialised societies — are only one set among many. Speaking from a Pākehā (non-Māori New Zealander) position, and orienting toward Māori knowledge, Mc Kinnon suggests ways in which Indigenous concepts of genealogical interconnection, kinship, and guardianship can reframe immersion as requiring relationship, responsibility, and care, rather than as sensory-experiential saturation. Reframed in this way, immersion is less an enclosure of the listener than a mode of ecological belonging. The immersive artwork can then become a way of thinking-and-doing together; situated interventions and experiments in repairing relations. The presentation will offer some conceptual and creative tools for doing such work.

BIO

Dugal McKinnon is a composer, sound artist, and researcher based in Aotearoa New Zealand. His practice oscillates around a fundamental question: what and how does sound allow us to know and feel? Working in electronic music, spatial audio, and interdisciplinary collaboration, he makes work that listens to the world as much as sounds it — compositions for IKOsahedral and Ambisonic loudspeaker arrays, generative modular synthesis, immersive and intimate installations, collaborations with filmmakers and kinetic sculptors, alongside pieces harnessing voice, instruments, electronics, text, and soundscapes. Scholarly inquiry and artistic practice are synergistic in his work, pitched to the material, ecological, and posthuman dimensions of sound and music, and the ways these resonate with space and place. His work is performed, exhibited, and published internationally and I have been composer-in-residence at IEM Graz, ZKM Karlsruhe, and STEIM Amsterdam. He teaches at Te Kōkī — New Zealand School of Music, Victoria University of Wellington, where he established the Sonic Arts programme in 2008 and co-direct the Lilburn Studios for Electronic Music.

ABSTRACT

Immersion: how to feel like you feel when you don’t feel
Immersive experience is an affective shortcut, a sensory directive towards ‘being somewhere’ which is, by design, not where it is. One can now encounter esoteric cultural practices between picking up a sandwich, and popping into the dry cleaners on the way back to the office. This slippery slope of affective alterity obscures all manner of problematics in the technologies, the political, economic and social conditions of production, and the surrogate connections experienced in these experiences. These can anaesthetise us to realities of disconnection by suggesting that we phenomenologically merge with the subject matter in an immersive experience, which we do not. Immersive experience might need to involve further dimensions of experience to mitigate against its own affective power, or risk replicating the systems through which it is produced, only to amplify their in-built injustices.

BIO

Angela McArthur is an artist, academic and interdisciplinary advocate. She leads a Master's programme in spatial sound in the department of Anthropology.

Her work centres around the practice and theorisation of materiality in sound, underrepresented (including other-than-human) onto-epistemologies, and ocean environments. She asks questions about what the third dimension of sound affords, aesthetically and ethically.

ABSTRACT

Resonant Presences and Future Spatiality: Sculptural Sound and Critical Immersion Studies for Hybrid Sonic Societies
Extended reality is reshaping perception, yet dominant spatial audio technologies — Ambisonics, Wave Field Synthesis, Dolby Atmos — remain driven by signal modelling and reproduction fidelity, leaving their aesthetic and socio-political dimensions largely unexamined.

Through the framework of Critical Immersion, this presentation argues that presence is not transmitted by technology but co-constructed through the negotiations between participant and system — across its gaps and instabilities. Defectiveness and fractured illusion become sites of heightened reflection and perceptual possibility. The presentation calls for a post-disciplinary practice treating sound as a sculptural force — collapsing boundaries between composition, architecture, and performance — and advocates moving beyond seamless simulation toward the deliberate design of hybrid sonic societies: composing not merely audio signals, but new modes of human coexistence.

BIO

Over the past 20 years, sound artist and composer Gerriet Krishna Sharma has been deeply involved in the spatialisation of electroacoustic and instrumental compositions using Ambisonics and Wave Field Synthesis. In 2016, he completed his doctorate with “Composing with Sculptural Sound Phenomena in Computer Music” at the scientific-artistic doctoral school in Graz (AT). His sculptural works have been presented at international festivals, conferences, and symposia. In 2017/18, he held the DAAD Edgard Varèse Guest Professorship at TU Berlin, and from 2022 to 2024 served as Guest Professor for Experimental Sound and Sound as Space at HfG/ZKM Karlsruhe. Sharma has published internationally in journals and books on spatial practices, initiated the Special Interest Group Spatial Aesthetics and Artificial Environments within the Society for Artistic Research, and co-founded spæs: Lab for Spatial Aesthetics in Sound at Funkhaus Berlin.

CLAIM

“Immersion is a corporeal effect constituted by the dynamic processes of participation, mutual response and the intrinsic pleasure fostered by the participating activities.”

BIO

Holger Schulze is Professor in Musicology at the University of Copenhagen and Principal Investigator at the Sound Studies Lab. His sonic anthropology explores how sounds and listening in the 21st century stabilise, disrupt, and permeate everyday life. Artistic practices and everyday objects are both of equal concern to his sonic critique. He is co-editor of The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Sound Studies (forthcoming 2028), The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound in Museums (forthcoming 2026), and The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Art (2020), and author of Sonic Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2020) and The Sonic Persona (Bloomsbury, 2018), among others.