Grassroots Ambisonics

Project Overview

Over the last three years, phonon~ has been shaping a space where professional learning, artistic creation, and attentive listening merge to build up a shared international community space.

What we call our summer lab is not a single event but a living structure symposium, residency, concert — each feeding the next through shared time, place, and focused work. The symposium opens the field: a gathering of artists, researchers, and curious listeners, with workshops and lectures open to the public. Here, knowledge flows horizontally — between beginners and professionals, musicians and philosophers — creating a temporary community of practice.

© Polina Khatsenka

Ambisonics summer school' 23 - outdoor lectures by Martin Nitsche and Vít Pokorný.

The residency continues this exchange on a more intimate scale. For one to three weeks, the participants live and work together, composing, experimenting, and discussing their ideas on two ambisonic systems (16- and 24-channel), both built and tuned with our long-term partner OTTOsonics. Finally, the process unfolds into a public concert, where the newly created works are being showcased to the audience, transforming the location into a shared living environment.

From the first edition we also released a compilation album, extending the experience beyond the summer. Each new year brings another layer — new collaborations, new questions, new ways of learning through sound — slowly building a sustainable platform for collective exploration in the field of spatial audio.

© Isabel Tkáčová

MELUSINES' 24 poster by Isabel Tkáčová.

Origins and perspective

Starting the first chapter of the Ambisonic Summer Lab, we in the phonon~ association simply had a need to make real something that wasn’t there. Our motivation for organising events around Ambisonics has been driven by a lack of educational activities where knowledge is shared directly, in person, and with care. We wanted to create a setting where an in-the-field artist could meet another artist, where conversations would turn into collaborations, and where mentorship would happen not through hierarchy, but through genuine attention and presence. 

When we launched the first lab in 2023, the idea was not only to teach spatial audio techniques, but to build the conditions for direct contact — to create a place where people could live together, learn by doing, and approach technology as something that connects rather than isolates.

For us, Ambisonics has always been more than a technical format. It’s a way of thinking about sound as a dimension of its own, and sonic space as something that can be sculpted. The lab structure complexity — combining symposium, residency, and concert — grew naturally from the idea of focused learning by doing and sharing as three complementary actions. In a sense, the project works as an informal school — a place where learning is reciprocal, where teaching means listening, and where tools and ideas are shared freely. The collaboration with OTTOsonics and other partners grew out of this same spirit: a belief that education can happen through building things together.

So said, the project was an answer to the scarcity of accessible infrastructures for immersive audio outside of major institutions. We wanted to make it possible for emerging artists to work in 3D sound without needing institutional affiliation or high-end studios — to bring the tools, the knowledge, and the sense of possibility closer to people.

© Marie Šrajerová

OTTOsonics speaker.

Three Editions: 2023–2025 Overview

2023 – Ambisonics Summer School

The first edition, held in Staňkovice and Ústí nad Labem, was both an experiment and a declaration of intent. We wanted to see if a temporary community could emerge around the practice of spatial sound — and it did. Eleven residents from across Europe came together to work, live, and listen on two systems: a 16-channel setup at Löblhof & Artgrund, and a 24-channel open-source array, both by OTTOsonics, our Austrian partner whose contribution shaped everything that followed.

Alongside the residency ran a public symposium with workshops by artists, engineers, and philosophers, bridging practice and reflection. The final concert MELUSINES transformed the National House in Ústí into an immersive listening architecture — a moment where the audience could experience the energy of this collective process. In 2023 the lab hosted contributions from Manu Mitterhuber (OTTOsonics) on immersive system operation, Felix Deufel (ZiMMT) on multichannel recording and spatial performance tools, Enrique Tomás (Tangible Music Lab, Linz) on haptic interfaces, Jiří Suchánek (SVITAVA) on light-controlled sound, and philosophers Martin Nitsche and Vít Pokorný on phenomenology and rhythm.

The first edition (2023) gathered thirteen residents from across Europe — including STURMHERTA, Veronika Mayer, Dimitris Savva, Jakob Gille, Shannon Soundquist, Daniel Nulty & Ingrid Frivold, LORELEI & Ben Meerwein, Pablo Torres Gomez, and Identity Work in Progress. Their newly created works were premiered at the MELUSINES concert in Ústí nad Labem and later compiled into a digital release. Following the residency, we presented the project at ZiMMT Leipzig in a special evening that combined the MONOM archives, adapted for Ambisonics, with phonon~ residency outputs performed as both fixed-media pieces and live improvisations — our first international showcase.

2024 – SPATIAL Sommer Lab

The second edition marked an expansion. Under the title SPATIAL, the project grew into a 3 week laboratory, expanded the program with workshops by Magdaléna Manderlová, Jakob Gille, Jan Krtička, Jan Burian, Daniele Fabris & Francesco Corvi, Jan Hrubeš, and returning mentors from OTTOsonics, ZiMMT, and Tangible Music Lab — covering topics from field recording and garden acoustics to live spatialization, DIY quadraphonic hardware, and software-based 3D performance.

This time, the focus moved beyond introducing the technology toward exploring how spatial sound can become a tool for artistic thinking. The lab offered a dense program of lectures and hands-on workshops — from phenomenological sound studies to DIY hardware, impulse response measurement, and live spatialization systems.

The residency culminated once again in the MELUSINES ’24 concert, presenting works by Viktória Arvayová, Michael Džindžichašvili, Hou Lam Wu (Eagle), Heu Hsu & Daniel Lythgoe, Martin Janda, and Carina Pesch — whose compositions explored the perceptual and ecological dimensions of immersive sound. It became clear that SPATIAL was not only an educational format but also a growing network of friendships and shared practice.

2025 – Liquid Summer Lab

The third chapter, Liquid Summer Lab, took the project beyond Czech borders for the first time, landing at Heymannbaude in Saxon Switzerland, Germany.
Co-organized with OTTOsonics and supported by local partners Verein zur Förderung von Kunst und Kultur im ländlichen Raum Sachsen e.V., the lab evolved into a cross-border exchange — a week-long retreat dedicated to 3D sound composition, technical experimentation, and collective reflection. Liquid Summer Lab continued the trajectory of previous editions, hosting Manu Mitterhuber, Jakob Gille, and Ben Wesch for a week of collective experimentation with ambisonic setups, creative & calibrational tools (Spatial Synthesizer & Lotto) and possibilities of DIY system buildup.

After three years, the summer lab has become both a pedagogical experiment and a shared infrastructure, a platform where knowledge circulates freely, and where each year deepens the sense of what it means to learn through sound.

The 2025 Liquid Summer Lab continues the line of residencies with a more intimate format, inviting a small group of artists to develop works in the natural acoustics of Saxon Switzerland. There, the emphasis shifts toward experimentation, outdoor sound practices, and live composition in relation to landscape.

Across all editions, the residency artists form the core of the project — each contribution expanding the shared language of spatial music and strengthening the evolving network of practitioners around phonon~.

© Personal archive

A cave nearby Heymannbaude.

DIY, open source, and the practice of mutual support

At the heart of everything we do lies a belief that knowledge should circulate freely — that complex technologies can be shared, understood, and rebuilt collectively. Working with spatial audio often demands expensive tools and institutional infrastructure, but we’ve tried to approach it differently: through DIY ethics and open-source philosophy. Instead of waiting for access, we build what we need, together.

This approach naturally brought us into dialogue with OTTOsonics, an Austrian collective based in Ottensheim, whose work has become a cornerstone of the European DIY spatial audio scene. Their open-source ambisonic system — made of self-printed speaker housings and freely available schematics — offered not only the technical foundation for our labs, but also a methodology of collaboration. It showed that building a sound system can be an educational and social process at once: soldering, testing, listening, adjusting, learning side by side. Through this partnership, our participants experience sound technology not as a black box, but as something transparent and alive — a structure that anyone can access, understand, and reproduce. It is a lesson in both sound and solidarity: sharing tools, sharing labour, sharing creativity.

Every cable soldered and speaker assembled becomes a small act of mutual support, reinforcing the idea that immersive technologies do not have to belong only to well-funded institutions. They can also grow from community, improvisation, and care.

© phonon~

Ambisonics summer school' 23 - Manu Mitterhuber workshop.

OTTOsonics: infrastructure as education

OTTOsonics is a collective based in Ottensheim, Austria, developing open-source systems for 3D sound. Their platform offers freely available blueprints, schematics, and software tools that allow anyone to build an ambisonic loudspeaker array — from compact studio setups to large-scale concert configurations. What makes OTTOsonics unique is not only their technical ingenuity, but also their commitment to openness: technology as shared knowledge rather than proprietary product.

Our collaboration with OTTOsonics began before the first summer lab and has since become its backbone. Every edition of the residency relies on their systems — from the portable 16-channel setup used for workshops to the 24-channel dome presented at public concerts. Beyond providing infrastructure, OTTOsonics engage directly in the educational process. Their co-founder Manu Mitterhuber joins each edition as a mentor, guiding participants through the full experience of working with immersive sound: from soldering and calibration to spatialization workflows and decoding strategies.

© Personal archive

Liquid Summer Lab' 25 - LOTTO workshop by Ben Wesch.

For us, this partnership is more than technical. It reflects our shared motivation to make spatial audio accessible — to offer people the opportunity to try technologies that would otherwise remain out of reach, and to do something they might not be able to do without such a platform. We see it as part of a larger mission to popularize Ambisonics, to bring immersive sound beyond the academic and institutional world, and to support a growing network of independent creators who want to explore it freely.

© Marie Šrajerová

Truncated icosahedron speaker aka Death Star by OTTOsonics.

Learning to listen

Looking back at these past three years, what stays with us most are not the technical milestones, but the moments of shared experience — when a group of people, many of whom had never met before, sit quietly in a circle of speakers and experience sound as something alive, sculptural, and deeply social. That is the essence of what we try to build: a culture of listening as a form of learning.

© Personal archive

Ambisonics summer school' 23 - a listening walk. 

In times when technology often isolates, we use it as a way to connect — to connect disciplines, generations, and localities that might never otherwise meet. The summer labs are not large-scale productions; they are small ecosystems that thrive on mutual attention, improvisation, and care. Every cable soldered, every system tested, every shared meal contributes to something bigger: a network of people who see sound not only as a medium, but as a way of being together. Through this ongoing initiative, we hope to keep opening doors — for those who want to approach spatial sound for the first time, and for those who already work within it but seek a more human, community-driven context.

Our aim is simple: to demystify immersive audio, to make it a tool for artistic freedom rather than exclusivity, and to nurture a field where education, creation, and play naturally coexist.

In the end, phonon~ summer labs is less about a format than about a movement — one that listens, builds, and learns from each resonance it sets in motion.

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