EDGE Sound Research has invented Embodied Sound™, capable of transforming ordinary objects like stadium seating and flooring into multi-sensory audio experiences. Users can hear and feel everything—from music in a venue to live sporting action—in an entirely new way in real time.

"Multimodal" describes the integration of multiple communication or sensory methods, like visual, auditory, and tactile inputs, to create a more comprehensive and immersive user experience of a single event. An example of a multimodal experience is witnessing a F1 race in person, when we engage multiple senses simultaneously – hearing the roaring sound of engines, seeing the visual thrill of high-speed cars racing, and the feeling of vibrations from the track's intensity.

This is the industry’s first intentional multimodal audio system, capable of taking any existing audio signal and optimizing its path to effectively engage both the senses of hearing and touch. 

To ‘embody’ something means to give it a tangible form, and Embodied Sound™ gives a physical direct interaction of sound, which is normally not intended to be felt by the body.

Even though our bodies interact with sound every day (try plugging your ears and talking to someone - you can still hear, but it sounds like you’re underwater!), the world trend toward smaller speakers all but eliminates the ‘realness’ of sound. We need to leverage how our bodies naturally understand the world to include other senses to recreate sonic reality.

Each Embodied Sound™ system includes:

Embodied Sound™ Control Hub = Amplifiers and computing that power an Embodied Sound™ system. 

ResonX™ Core = A transducer array that is attached to any object. 

Embodied Sound™ Dashboard = Software interface designed to streamline installation, calibration, and management of a fleet of ResonX™ Core devices.

It took someone who had to rely on feeling sound to invent sound you can feel. For our co-founder, Dr. Ethan Castro, sound is more than just a sense; it's a way of life. Born prematurely and hard of hearing, Ethan was told early on that he shouldn't pursue a career in music. But that didn't stop him. As a child, Ethan would hug his father's speakers to feel every element , relying on his sense of touch to experience the music that he couldn't fully hear.

Driven by a passion for sound and a desire to create something new, Ethan went on to become a professional audio engineer and composer, determined to pursue a superior audio experience. Today, Ethan is a Ph.D. focused on how to combine hearing and feeling to create a new form of audio reproduction that can be experienced by everyone. Embodied Sound™ technology is the result of Ethan’s academic research and CEO Val Salomaki’s vision, and it promises to revolutionize how we experience the touch of full-range sound in a way that was never before possible.

Since Embodied Sound can turn ordinary objects into sources of sound by controlling vibration, there is no need for traditional speakers to create a clean auditory experience.

Haptics uses silent touch-based feedback for interaction, usually within a certain frequency range to mimic the sense of touch without any sound. Embodied Sound delivers both tactile sensations and audible sound across the entire audio frequency range, offering a rich, multi-sensory experience.

Audible Audio: Generating sound that is heard through the ears within the human hearing range, typically from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz. It is harder to hear frequencies at the low and high extremes of this range, especially in older or heavily damaged ears (like too many concerts!) Haptic Audio: Generating vibrations or movements that can be felt on the skin or muscles, often used to convey information but feels like notifications on your phone..

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Typically an on/off signal from 10 Hz to 200 Hz Tactile Audio: Generating sound you can perceive through the sense of touch, typically from 10 Hz to 200 Hz. Tactile audio sounds and feels like sitting near a subwoofer. Embodied Sound: Generating sound you can hear and feel simultaneously in the entire audio range from 7 Hz to 20,000 Hz.

Short answer, yes. Today, any Embodied Sound enabled device can function as a dedicated receiver of channel based audio by routing the same signal that would have otherwise gone to a full-frequency speaker to the Embodied Sound receiver. In some cases, you may need to mix both the full frequency channel and the LFE channels together before routing to the Embodied Sound device. 

Every Embodied Sound device carries the same accessible frequency range by design, which means that you can set the Embodied Sound device as a full-frequency receiver for spatial audio systems and place wherever you want in your space - in the couch, in the wall, hanging, or even in the floor, and once you tell your renderer the location, your renderer will take care of any spatialization needed to activate.

New forms of spatial audio which leverage the unique acoustic properties and unrestricted installation locations of Embodied Sound are coming.

Over the past 18-months, Embodied Sound has been live tested at Target Field with the Minnesota Twins (2022), Reverb by Hard Rock Hotel (2023), Golden 1 Center with the Sacramento Kings (2023), NBA Summer League (2023), Sounds of the Ocean in Hamburg, Germany (2023).

In 2024, we are excited to announce new partners helping us build the future of audio experiences by leveraging Embodied Sound technology.

Inside the Demo Pod, there are four pieces of flooring, four lounge seats, and four panels, all transformed into Embodied Sound using our ResonX Core devices. This layout demonstrates how easily it scales into any seating or flooring arrangement, or by using the objects almost like Lego blocks to create a multi-modal audio experience. To control the audio system, we are showcasing our Embodied Sound dashboard, where a user can control how much each element is heard and felt for the most impactful experience.

Yes. The power of Embodied Sound is that the environment does not heavily impact the audio experience, as the body is the target, not the ears.

Our hardware, ResonX Core, is carefully designed to provide the best Embodied Sound experience for the majority of use-cases, but ultimately, it's just hardware that vibrates. Our software unlocks its capabilities by tuning the available vibrations to any object, ensuring a reliable and clean signal every time.

Our system can take any standard audio feed and real time condition into audio that is heard and felt. This can be further optimized by using best practices for multimodal audio. We are building a dedicated platform to host advanced AI-DSP plugins needed for unique and challenging use-cases.

Through the use of our software interface, venues can allow users to control certain aspects of their Embodied Sound experience, such as allowing for precise control over how much tactile vs acoustic stimuli they experience, individual mix control over all venue elements, etc.

In all cases, users will always be allowed to control how much or little of the provided experience they receive with a seat-based volume knob.