Album Info

 Release Date 06 August 2025
 Available on Spotify, Apple Music (in Dolby Atmos), YouTube Music, Amazon (in Dolby Atmos), iTunes (in Dolby Atmos), Instagram/Facebook, TikTok/Resso, Soundtrack by Twitch, Pandora, Deezer, Tidal (in Dolby Atmos), iHeartRadio, ClaroMusica, Saavn, Boomplay (beta), Anghami, KKBox, NetEase, Tencent, Triller (beta), MediaNet

From March to August MTU Cork School of Music invited 5 artists to devise works in our newly-opened Spatial Audio Lab as part of the Spatial Days Residency.

Spatial music, long a focus of academic research and experimental music, has recently entered the mainstream thanks to the rise of immersive technologies like virtual reality (VR) and new audio formats such as Dolby Atmos. These formats, now supported by many major streaming platforms, enable artists to craft three-dimensional soundscapes that envelop the listener and create a greater sense of immersion thanks to many additional speakers and better headphone support.

Working with CSM artistic mentors and technical advisors, they have produced a compilation album of contemporary pieces exploring creative possibilities of immersive and spatial audio. The album is available in Dolby Atmos on the supporting Apple Music, Tidal and Amazon platforms with stereo and binaural versions on other platforms like Spotify. We believe this is one of the first releases of experimental music in Dolby Atmos from the island of Ireland! 

Track Listing

 1. Detritus (by Shane Byrne)

Shane Byrne is a composer, researcher, and Programme Coordinator of the BSc (Hons) in Music and Sound Engineering at TUS Midlands. His research interests include audio-visual composition, spatial audio, human–computer interaction, and acoustic ecology. He has presented his work internationally at ICMC, SMC, UbiMus, and Sonorities, and his teaching integrates creative practice with technological innovation in music and sound studies.

This electroacoustic composition explores “detritus” as sonic fragments that linger as traces of memory and decay. Incorporating remnants from past performances, the work unfolds within an immersive spatial audio environment, where sounds merge, disperse, and shift meaning. The listener is not placed outside the work but embedded within its evolving field, carried through states of transformation that reflect on presence, absence, and time.

 2. Molly (by Brian Leach)

Brian Leach is a hammered dulcimer player and multi-instrumentalist working with traditional music and new technology.

This arrangement of Molly Saint George, composed by Thomas Connellan around 1680, features the voice of dulcimer player John Rea remembering the fiddle player who taught his father in County Antrim.We see our oldest music connected to our newest technology. This thread of tradition passing through the almost fogotten Irish Hammered Dulcimer.

Guest musicians:

David Murphy - Pedal steel

Matilde Lotti - Cello

 3. Salt (by Joshua Dyson)

Joshua Dyson is a researcher and field recordist based in Cork, specialising in spatial audio and acousmatic composition. Salt emerges from extended listening sessions along the Cork docks and seaside, where industrial machinery, coastal erosion, and fragments of everyday life coalesce into a dense sonic narrative. Using oscillators manipulated from site-specific field recordings, Dyson crafts an immersive audio experience through ambisonic orientation that conjures the tension between decay and utility, presence and memory. This work invites the audience to listen deeply to the textures of place as lived and reimagined. 

https://www.instagram.com/jod.oht/

 4. not a choir (by mcconville)

Thomas McConville is a composer, working in both electronic and acoustic music. His works have been performed internationally as part of various gallery installations, festivals and concert hall performances.  Under the pseudonym aliceee, as well as the name mcconville, he has released his compositions through the celebrated labels, Apollo/R&S Records and Schematic records, gaining support from BBC Radio 1, RTÉ Lyric, Radio France, electronic music duo Plaid (Warp Records), and Charli XCX among others. He has been commissioned by the City of Culture celebrations, shortlisted for the ISCM World Music Days 2015 and 2025 and broadcast as part of Warp Records Anniversary Essential Mix on BBC Radio 1.

https://www.instagram.com/aliceeeismyusername/

https://www.youtube.com/@aliceeeismyusername

https://soundcloud.com/aliceeeismyusername

 5. Inter_woven_Inter_stices (by Aoife Claffey)

Aoife Claffey is a Cork based multidisciplinary installation artist working with sculpture, projection film, and immersive sound. She co-founded the artist collective inter_site and is pursuing a PhD titled Inter_woven Networks through TU RISE at MTU, investigating interactive art, technology, and immersive environments. Her work explores human sensory perception through site-specific, multi-sensory environments, often engaging with fragility, unpredictability, and social structures.

Interwoven Interstices is a 10-minute surround sound piece created from found sounds and contact microphone recordings, reflecting on the gaps or “interstices” between natural and built environments. Its meditative layers shift and overlap, forming fragile textures and subtly unpredictable rhythms. The title refers to the spaces between objects and materials, captured through recordings of water, wind, traffic lights, train whistles, elevators, ocarinas, and breath, revealing the subtle fractures and overlaps within everyday environments.

 6. A Strange Way to Go (by Cárthach Ó Nuanáin)

Cárthach Ó Nuanáin is an intermedia, interdisciplinary artist and researcher whose practice is rooted in the sounding world. He lectures at MTU Cork School of Music and is the current course coodinator of the MA/MSc in Music & Technology.

Whenever I get writer's block I have to force myself to find new sounds. In this case the sounds were at my feet: a bag of cheap musical toys bought from a large online marketplace. These were recorded and processed through a spaghetti junction of custom software tools in an approach I would describe as "spectro-timbralist", continuing a series of works that focusses on the materiality of sound. Despite their frequent warping beyong recognition I hope the playfulness of these little things is retained.