Journey to the Centre of the Sound is an immersive sound composition developed from a field recording journey through Iceland and the gradual transformation of those recordings into a spatial and poetic listening work. The project began after Acoustic Heritage Collective researched the acoustic heritage of Þingvellir National Park, when the collective travelled to Snæfellsjökull - the volcano that, in Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, becomes the entrance to the depths of the planet.

Rather than treating Iceland as a landscape to be represented, the project approaches it as a territory in which geological time, weather, matter, and imagination affect the conditions of listening. Glaciers, geysers, lava caves, polar winds, waterfalls and subterranean resonances became not only sources of sound, but also materials through which to question the limits of perception. The journey was carried out with different recording tools — including contact microphones, hydrophones, electromagnetic field microphones, omnidirectional microphones and Ambisonic recording systems — expanding the act of listening beyond what the human ear can normally access.

The collected materials were then transformed into a composition in which field recordings, acoustic reverberations, poetry and the music of Hoarfrost are brought into relation. The work does not follow a documentary logic. Instead, it constructs an acoustic descent: a movement through external landscapes and imagined interiors, through surfaces, depths, resonances and unstable spatial perspectives. Sound becomes a way to move between geography and fiction, physical environment and speculative inner space.

A central part of the process was the recording and transformation of acoustic spaces. Impulse responses and Ambisonic recordings were used not only to document the reverberant qualities of specific locations but also to create new spatial relations within the composition. Through auralisation and spatialisation, recorded environments could be recomposed, displaced and opened into immersive listening situations where sounds appear from inside and outside, above and below, near and far.

Over time, Journey to the Centre of the Sound evolved into a work capable of moving between different spatial systems and modes of presentation. Its development included a residency and work preview at MONOM in Berlin, where the piece was spatialised through the 4DSOUND system, as well as further development for a Wave Field Synthesis system in the context of the Sound Cartography Conference. Later, the project also became a case study for translating immersive sound work into simulated and virtual environments, presented during the IRCAM Forum Workshops 2023 in Paris.

Through these transformations, the project became less a fixed composition than a research process into how sound can travel between physical, imagined and technically mediated spaces. Journey to the Centre of the Sound asks how field recordings can become spatial fiction, how acoustic measurements can become compositional material, and how listening can open a passage between landscape, memory, geology and the imagined depths of the Earth.