Polytope was founded by two friends connected by experiences where highly experimental uses of audio, sound, and music induce states of wonder.
Polytope is where you go when you want to create a listening experience that is a perceptual threshold into another world or deeper into the one we know.
INVENTING A DISCIPLINE: AUDIO SCENOGRAPHY
Over the past decade, the experience economy has taken hold of the public imagination. Industries—from museums and theme parks, to scientific research, philanthropy and orchestras—have searched for more and more engaging ways to present themselves and their vision to the public. High impact intersensory design is the new normal, particularly for cultural institutions looking to energize and engage. Within another decade, everything from retail to education will have adopted intersensory strategies, blurring the areas of media, art, and design further. AI-generated audio, video, texts will consolidate and redefine the norms of creative production over the past two hundred years and yet, what’s most particularly human will remain what’s most valuable to experience. The cultural landscape will never be the same.
The industry and standards for creating dynamic audio experiences is in its infancy. There is no existing, effective, support structure or discipline to align listening with the creative desires of our time or the logistics of large-scale culture-building endeavors. We imagined the discipline of Audio Scenography to address these challenges as they already appeared in the 2000s, and it is why we founded Polytope to evolve alongside.
WHAT IS AUDIO SCENOGRAPHY?
Audio Scenography is an interdisciplinary practice we created to elevate the aural experience of your project to be equal to the visual. Until now there has been no single discipline to address this in a comprehensive way. Before the invention of audio, acoustics was able to serve this function on its own, but this is no longer the case.
The phrase is derived as a fusion of two fields. In contemporary theater and performance, scenography is a recently developed production role which directs the experiential impact of all media and aesthetic concerns on the perceiver. In psychoacoustics, auditory scene analysis is the most widely adopted model for how humans transform the never-ending stream of sound information received by the ear into meaningful sense of things and place. Audio scenography takes responsibility for the scenographic impact of what is heard rather than providing ad hoc services that were never imagined nor can address the experience in its totality.
Audio Scenography is the expert interplay of technology, architecture, acoustics, and a content-driven musical or audio-based environment. Speakers, audio, computers and acoustic design are the tools. Air is the medium. The human body is the instrument through which artistic, scientific or commercial content can be metabolized into collective experience.
The Audio Scenographer operates fluently between art & design, engineering, and technology- capable of producing musical scores, creating audio, sound, and music concepts, in addition to handling architectural drawings for acoustic impact, working within the iterative processes used in the construction industry, and providing coordinated advice to all partners to ensure the imagined listening experiences are made real as the project unfolds.
An effective Audio Scenography is one in which all these different fields of expertise are understood as interdependent, audio, sound, and music concepts are communicated in actionable and accessible ways to all stakeholders, global creative intent is impactfully manifested for the listening audience.
Audio Scenography is a design approach, not an aesthetic. There are many possible solution networks, with a toolkit drawing from art history to physics. By leveraging this system, the right balance of acoustic, creative, and audio investments can be made to more efficiently yield the desired result. This means that each project will be unique and takes its own path toward success.
HOW WE WORK
We are unique partners for complex projects in which a distinctive approach is required. We execute professionally at the intersection of sound design, project management, composition, software development, infrastructure, and acoustics. We use cutting-edge technology and low-tech solutions in the same sentence. Our use of audio techniques is insightful and tailored to each project, combining with interactive and generative systems to produce a compelling audio scenography.
A successful collaboration requires consideration of audio scenography from the first conceptual stage of a new project through to the final installation. Together, we can arrive at a fruitful creative exchange that yields both ground-breaking and realizable experiences.