THAILAND: At UNFEST’26, held at Cloud 11 in Bangkok from 11–13 September, spatial audio moved beyond system demonstration and into the creative process. Sonos Libra, Adamson’s official distribution partner in Thailand, brought the Adamson Fletcher Machine to Spatial Stage 218, where artists combined sound, real-time visuals and lighting to explore new approaches to live performance.

Part of the festival’s UNLIVE programme, the stage placed sound within a spatial environment rather than confining it to a conventional stereo image. This gave performers another dimension to work with, allowing audio to be positioned and shaped within the performance space. Fletcher Machine provides tools for managing two- and three-dimensional loudspeaker configurations, grouping and linking audio objects, external control protocols and timecode. Its delay matrix offers user-assignable gain and delay, while Fletcher Machine Stage supports up to 128 × 128 inputs and outputs at 96 kHz, with 1.3 ms latency.

The technology, however, was only one part of the project. The groundwork began weeks before the festival, with Sonos Libra collaborating with Unformat Studio on a series of weekly spatial audio workshops at Uncommu from 5 August. The sessions introduced artists and creators to spatial audio and the Fletcher Machine system, exploring how sound could move beyond the conventional left-to-right stereo field. Alongside system operation, the workshops examined acoustics, psychoacoustics and the relationship between sound, space and human perception.

As Alfonso Martin, CEO of Sonos Libra, explained during one session, spatial audio gives artists additional parameters to shape, including distance, movement and position, as well as artificial reverberation and room emulation. Participants used the sessions to experiment with the system and develop their own creative ideas. The workshops therefore became an early stage of performance development, allowing artists to test how their sound could behave spatially before bringing those concepts to the festival.

At Spatial Stage 218, the audience surrounded a central performance area, with loudspeakers distributed around the space. This arrangement made speaker placement and audience positioning integral to the experience: the intended spatial effects depended on how sound interacted with the physical layout and where listeners were positioned.

The venue also presented acoustic challenges. Its concrete environment required additional acoustic treatment, while the loudspeaker arrangement had to support the spatial experience across the performance area. Some artists worked directly with Fletcher Machine, shaping how their sounds moved and occupied the space. The system became part of the performance process, connecting the experimentation undertaken during the workshops with the live presentation of the resulting ideas.

For Sonos Libra and Unformat Studio, the project linked technical learning with artistic development. By taking Fletcher Machine from the workshop environment to Spatial Stage 218, the collaboration demonstrated how spatial audio can serve not merely as a playback format, but as another creative instrument for live performance.