The Urban Listening Room: Spatial Audio Experience

The Rhythm of Joy is an Ambisonic spatial composition that situates community‑based music practice within a wider conversation about cultural resilience, political rupture, and embodied listening. Developed through Diamante Patterson’s sustained collaboration with the Ukumbozii Pan‑African Drum Circle, the work foregrounds the ethics of shared creation: consent‑driven field recording, reciprocal exchange, and an attentiveness to the social dynamics of collective performance.

Carlos' work showcases that the case for spatial audio, and ultimately audio archiving where listeners become connected through shared vibrations and physical sensations. In this context, atmosphere emerges not only from the music itself but from the intimacy between sound, bodies, technology, and space. The aim is to create an environment where meaning, identity, emotion, and community are produced collectively through the experience of listening.

Exploring London's Caribbean steel pan community, Yuze has created this composition in collaboration with the UFO Steel Band. The work engages with themes of diaspora identity, absence, and joy as a form of resistance. She has produced both a binaural version, which foregrounds the historical weight of the community's story, and a multichannel version, which foregrounds the communal joy of the music itself.

A choir rehearsal that listens past the signing. The work turns toward what usually goes unattended: a room filling, bodies settling, the loose sound of a group assembling itself before it begins. Here the acoustic life around community music-making is treated as an environment in its own right, not a backdrop to the songs performed within it. Drawing on the tradition of acoustic ecology , the piece holds that a soundscape persists whether or not anyone attends to it, and that those who know a place hear it differently. For the members of Hackney Voices, this is a room they already know by ear.

The project, titled Spatial Audio as an Acoustic Threshold, explores the relationship between the unstable public soundscape of Trafalgar Square and the reverberant, ritualised environment of St Martin-in-the-Fields. It asks why people continue to seek inner calm within sacred spaces situated at the centre of social unrest. Rather than presenting the two locations as a simple opposition between exterior chaos and interior calm, the piece treats the church as an acoustic threshold. Public protest, spoken address and sacred music gradually overlap and reshape one another, moving the listener through exterior pressure, threshold speech and sacred expansion before elements of the public soundscape return. The ending deliberately leaves the relationship between civic expression and sacred listening unresolved.

Dana Sousa-Limbu is a creative researcher and cultural producer, and the creator of The Urban Listening Room, an ongoing public programme at UCL East exploring sound system culture through collective listening, making, and public engagement. She leads the programme's creative direction, research, and partnerships through ECHOS MONDE, her cultural production studio designing spaces for listening, participation and public life.

Diamante Patterson is a spatial sound practitioner, artist, student on the Designing Audio Experiences MA, and student partner on The Urban Listening Room. Through spatial audio composition and event co-facilitation, he explores how sound is encountered, inhabited, and interpreted collectively. His contribution focuses on the listener's experience, observing how sound shapes relationships between people and space, and how collective listening can become a shared form of participation and reflection.

Carlos Bandi is an audio composer, artist, student on the Designing Audio Experiences MA, and student partner on The Urban Listening Room. His original spatial audio works explore sound as both a narrative and spatial medium, creating immersive sonic environments that shape how audiences experience and interpret space together. Developed through the Build in Process programme, his compositions form a key sonic layer across the project's listening sessions, documentary, and wider creative outputs.

James Bull is a sound technician at UCL East, bringing a wealth of expertise to showcasing spatial audio in the Black Box.