We’ve been working with cities for a long time. One of the first things you notice when you arrive somewhere new is how it feels to listen there – the way traffic wraps around buildings, how voices carry through markets, what happens after dark. Many cities have spent serious time and money improving how they look and how clean their air is. Far fewer have tuned how they sound.

Sonic Ground is our way of gathering together the work we do with architects, developers, and cultural organisations who are starting to think about this. 

Environmental music has long existed as a backdrop to public spaces, and more often than not provides an unspectacular, and usually unconnected layer to cover up the ambient sound of the space [aside from some important moments in history such as 1980s kankyo ongaku in Japan]. 

It’s our ambition to move beyond this backdrop, and to consider sound not as decoration, but as infrastructure — something that subtly directs movement, frames perception, and alters behaviour within public space.

With the Sonic Ground program we seek to ask questions about the meaning and purpose of spaces, how people move within and interact with it, and the kinds of emotional states and reactions places cause, and could cause with the right sonic stimulation. 

Rather than applying generic ambient systems, Sonic Ground develops site-responsive compositions informed by architecture, human flow, local history, and behavioural science. It draws from both artistic collaboration and research into psychoacoustics and urban sound perception. 

We are currently working with Sonic Lab at OIST to find the data that can support this [for example there have been 2 experiments so far within the controlled environment of a pedestrian foot tunnel where we are testing responses in behaviour from the application of different sounds].

The research is ongoing, but interestingly, when comparing fully synthetic imitations vs real world natural sounds, we are finding that there is a distinct correlation between the slight sonic imperfection that exists in nature and positive responses for listeners:

"Natural sounds left people feeling more positive, while synthetic imitations fell short - producing weaker, more muddled emotional responses. We likened this to an auditory "uncanny valley", where something that sounds almost real can feel subtly unsettling rather than soothing. " [Sonic Lab excerpt from "Oto Iro" experiment summary, to be published in 2026]

For us, the implications of this research being applied to busy locations and in working with designers of space designers, architects, pedestrian thoroughfares and plazas, shopping centres, hospitality and more is a very exciting prospect. The non-places could become places – serious sites for care, not just functional corridors.

What would it mean for a new hotel, a shopping mall, or a station to have a sonic identity that grows out of its place, rather than being piped in from nowhere? Sound deserves to be there at the planning stages, and can be the invisible something special that elevates experiences of the future!

In each setting, we believe that sound can function as soft guidance — encouraging pause, smoothing transitions, reducing stress, or even subtly influencing crowd distribution.

- Nick Luscombe + James Greer