"Liberino"

Year 2025

Type: Immersive and site-specific headphone-based theatre performance with spatial sound

Partners, institutions and production: Stivalaccio Teatro 

Festival / context: BePopular Festival – Vicenza (Church of San Vincenzo)

Dramaturgy and direction: Valentina Brusaferro

Performer: Matteo Cremon

Role: sound designer and sound engineer: immersive sound design, live audio direction, creation of binaural 3D soundscapes and integration of live acoustic capture, spatialisation and barrel-organ performance within an Augmented Audio Reality framework.

Short description

“Liberino” is a one-hour immersive sonic performance experienced entirely through wireless headphones, merging theatre, sound art and binaural composition into a single architecture of listening. Rooted in post-war rural Veneto culture, the piece follows Liberino, a marginal and misunderstood figure whose compulsive, fragmented speech unfolds as a stream of visionary, surreal and tragicomic images. Through headphones, the audience inhabits his aural perspective, constantly oscillating between disembodied inner voices, hallucinated soundscapes and the external acoustic world of the church and its surroundings.

Sound design and methodology

The sound design combines live capture (headworn wireless microphone and multiple ambient mics in the church), real-time mediated listening and pre-composed 3D binaural soundscapes sent to the headphones. Binaural “interior” sound layers—mechanical rhythms, drones, spectral textures and the voices of “the poets”—project Liberino’s disturbed inner world directly into the listener, contrasted with the “outer” environment and a custom mechanical‑digital barrel organ whose three original themes are heard acoustically in the space. Developed as part of practice‑based research on immersive, site-specific sound dramaturgy and Augmented Audio Reality, the project explores how technological mediation, architectural acoustics and spatial sound can position audiences inside a character’s aural perspective, shaping narrative perception, empathy and memory.

Official link