Yanrong Tian
Sonic Gardening



Sonic Gardening
TYPE: Sound Interface Design / Game Design
Indivudal Work,
TOOLS: Unity, Blender, Wwise
TIME: 2024.9-2025.6




"Sonic Gardening"is an experiment, is an interactive interface designed for spatial audio experiences. I tried to combine spatial sound with modular toy block concept, set within the context of Chinese Gardening, which also share similar characteristics of “flow” and “temporal disapperance”. 

Inspired by the Chinese garden philosophy of "changing scenery with each step," I reimagined traditional approaches to sound creation and listening, moving away from linear timelines and progress bars, and transformming visually scene trnsitions into sound flows. 

Technically, I combined spacial audio with realtime interactivity to co-create a participatory, and creativity-encouraging dynamic garden with users. Within Sonic Gardening, user becomes the Garden Creator, shape the soundscape while interacting. Also user becomes the Wanderer, experiencing sound by moving through it.

This experimental project evolved from an initial exploration of gamification elements in sound design to a deeper focus on embodied design, examining the fundamental perception of sound. This work introduces a spatial sound creation model that seeks to broaden the participatory possibilities of sound art, and open new experimental directions for sound and interaction design.




Video Documentation







NYU Demo

 

Physical Installation Environment
Three-wall 90° rear-projection setup paired with a 7.1.4 surround loudspeaker array (routed via Dante audio networking), further developed at NYU's Sony Audio Institute Lab.

Software / Technical Stack
  • Unity 2022.3.8f1 (URP rendering pipeline), combining voxel construction, Wave Function Collapse procedural generation, and BFS-based connected component analysis
  • Wwise for spatial audio (7.1.4, transmitted via Dante)
  • KlakNDI for video streaming
  • Version control via GitHub Desktop
  • Audio production: Ableton Live, Elastik 3 (Ueberschall), Kontakt (East Asia sound library), Adobe Audition


Exhibition in  Tongji Univerisity



Design Process






Screen Shot
Garden-Making Mode

Creating spatial sound using gardening sound blocks.
Four different scenes.


Garden-Wandering Mode

Experiencing spatial sound in first person view.
Wander in the garden. Get through it.

Wander Path, Interface, and more...






©2025 Yanrong Tian