The Sonic Ground project first took form at Wonderfruit 2025, where five site-specific installations were embedded across the festival landscape. Each responded directly to its setting.

ENTER WONDER
MSCTY_Studio ft. Elsa Hewitt + Kirk Barley

We created a piece for all arrivals on site to hear as they arrived at the entrance of Wonderfruit’s Decade of Wonder.

The piece, Enter Wonder, is constructed from field recordings of the festival site itself [when totally empty] that evolve across day and night, highlighted by the “dew point” moments of dawn and dusk when the trees and bushes come to life with insect and bird life.

We collaborated with UK musicians Kirk Barley and Elsa Hewitt, who reinterpreted our soundscape with guitar, voice, and electronic processing, adding more complexity and layering to the soundscape. 

With speakers placed within structures created by Ab Rogers Design [ARD] The end result is that everybody jumped straight into Sonic Minds’ outputs as soon as they arrived, and immediately were thrown into the sonic universe of life in the fields when there were no visitors. 

 The sound marked psychological arrival. Before any stage, before any performance, there was an atmosphere. Sonic Minds entered the body before the programme did.

THE BRIDGE TO WONDERNESS/THE BRIDGE FROM WONDERNESS
MSCTY_Studio ft. Midori Takada

The Bridge across a small stream that connects Wonderfruit’s main area with the Wonderness and Ancestral Forest area became a literal and symbolic connector between zones. 

We wanted to create a soundscape that caused people to stop, to slow down, to listen, and to engage with the location and setting. 

First we made recordings of the bridge itself, the percussive sounds from brushing against it, and the sound of footsteps on its somewhat flexible wooden structure. Then, we took these and processed them to create ambient backdrops to send out from either end of the bridge, signposting to passers by that there is a reason to come towards it. 

For the middle of the bridge we worked with Midori Takada, a key figure in 1980s Japanese ambient music, who read the following words connected to the concept of bridges as connections [real and metaphorical] between people and places.

These words sit alongside her musical performance to create the final piece, which many have told us was a highlight of their explorations of A Decade of Wonder. 

SYNTH POP CITY BANGKOK
MSCTY_Studio ft. Shook

At the urban SOT stage, our collaboration with Shook introduced processed Bangkok field recordings into the rural Thai landscape, aiming to take listeners out of the fields and into an imagined cityscape. 

The work challenged assumptions that natural sound is inherently more calming than urban sound. We are working under the assumption that comfort is a contextual thing, and that for some [for example if you grow up next to the Bangkok metro], the first train in the morning could have the same grounding effect as the dawn chorus in some others: sonic comfort is probably contextual, not universal.

This line of thinking connects to OIST Sonic Lab's research examining how individuals respond differently to urban versus natural soundscapes. Studies suggest that perceived comfort correlates strongly with lived experience. For those raised in dense cities, traffic may function as acoustic reassurance rather than disturbance.

Sonic Ground builds on this insight. It reframes environmental composition not as a retreat into idealised nature, but as an engagement with lived context.

SONIC INTERVENTIONS
MSCTY_Studio ft. Mark de Clive-Lowe

The Wonderfruit site evolves and changes every year, and in 2025, there were two interesting new developments that we created soundscapes for. 

They were based on field recordings from the lakeside near Forbidden Fruit stage, a place that is teeming with layers of life, and one of the most sonically active places in the area. We worked with Mark de Clive-Lowe, who created responding synth textures, which we then resampled and used as our musical building blocks for the work.  

Our Parkland is a zone designated for chilling in the trees, with a circle of hammocks, a spacious area to relax, and even an unofficial palace to sleep after a morning’s dancing at the Solar Stage. Our soundtrack for it works with simple, slow repetitive motifs that echo through the trees, slowly evolving to create a longform piece. 

The Kissing Benches is a new location developed by ARD as a social gathering space, and for which we composed a very simple ambient soundscape that would attract visitors to the space so that they would stop by and gather there. 

Both pieces explore intimacy, social proximity, and spatial mood, drawing on 1980s Japanese environmental music aesthetics, and aiming to subtly influence behaviour and be barely noticeable — shaping atmosphere without demanding attention, and  influencing how long people lingered, how conversations unfolded, and how proximity and intimacy felt.