Author: Benjamin Pohler

Most audio is designed in a vacuum – recorded dry and later drowned in artificial reverb. But what if we could design sound with real spaces in mind?

With my tool, I apply captured RIRs to original sounds, placing them into their authentic spatial context. A whisper in a cathedral, a guitar in a concrete stairwell, a voice in a silent forest – all can be recreated digitally and realistically.

This goes beyond fidelity – it’s about emotion, presence, and narrative. Sound design becomes site-specific. Just like film locations matter, so do acoustic locations.

Each space has a story to tell. I want to help sound designers listen to it.

In my first prototype, I’m developing a mobile tool that turns a smartphone into an acoustic camera. Just clap your hands or play a short sweep tone – the reflections tell us everything about how sound travels in the space.

My app records these Room Impulse Responses in 360° using either basic stereo mics or, in the future, Ambisonics capsules. It then uploads the result, together with GPS coordinates, to a crowdsourced global Soundmap.

We’re not just mapping the world visually. We’re learning to map it acoustically.

This could democratize spatial audio for music, game audio, VR, and sound preservation.

Prototype Screenshot:

Have you ever walked into a space and instantly felt its unique sound atmosphere?
Just like photographers capture the look of a space, we can now capture how a room sounds. My current research explores a concept I call acoustic photography – turning the complex echoes, reverberations and reflections of a room into a sonic “picture”.

Using a Impulse Response (IR) – an acoustic fingerprint of any environment – we can recreate its unique auditory qualities. With this, dry recordings can be placed into real acoustic environments using a method called convolution. The result? Audio that sounds like it was recorded in that space.