Step Inside the Cube
August 1, 2026
November 5, 11, December 9, 2025. ICAT and AAD.From left, Brittney S. Harris and Trevor Finney helped create motion-captured graphics in the University Library to use for the Nikki Giovanni Immersive Experience.
Tucked inside the Center for the Arts is one of the world's most unique performance spaces. Known simply as the Cube, it looks like a black box theatre, but it sounds like something else entirely.
An immersive environment where artists can create experiences that couldn't exist anywhere else, the Cube is part theatre, part laboratory, and part creative studio. Through a partnership between the center and the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology (ICAT), the space brings artists, researchers, and students together to explore new possibilities in performance, technology, and creative expression.
Combining flexible seating with advanced spatial audio, motion capture, and immersive projection technologies, the Cube can transform to support concerts, immersive installations, interactive performances, digital art, research projects, and experiences that blend multiple artistic disciplines. Rather than adapting their work to fit the space, artists can use the Cube to rethink how audiences experience sound, visuals, movement, and storytelling.
What Is Spatial Audio?
Imagine stepping inside a piece of music. Instead of listening to sound from a stage, you're surrounded by it. Voices drift overhead. Instruments move across the room. Every sound has a place, and every seat offers a different perspective.
That's the promise of spatial audio.
Traditional stereo lets you hear sounds from the left and right. Surround sound adds speakers around the room. Spatial audio goes a step further, allowing artists to precisely position and move sounds in three-dimensional space, creating the sensation that you're inside the performance rather than simply listening to it.
More Than Surround Sound
The Cube was designed from the ground up for immersive listening.
A typical home theatre uses a 5.1 audio system: five speakers and one subwoofer. Many movie theatres use an 8.3 system.
The Cube takes that concept to another level with a 142.6 spatial audio system, providing 148 independently controlled audio channels throughout the space. Unlike traditional surround sound, where groups of speakers work together, every speaker in the Cube operates as its own individual channel.
That independence gives artists and researchers extraordinary control over sound. Instead of simply making audio louder or quieter, they can precisely place it anywhere in the room and move it seamlessly through space. The result isn't just listening. It's immersion.
Where Arts Meets Research
While the Cube's immersive technologies create extraordinary artistic experiences, they also make it a powerful research environment. Its spatial audio system helps researchers explore sound in new ways, high-speed motion capture cameras precisely track movement throughout the space, and an immersive projection system transforms the Cube into virtual environments for simulations, digital artworks, and interactive experiences.
Researchers have used spatial audio to analyze massive data sets by assigning sounds and pitches to information, allowing patterns to be heard as well as seen. Others have recreated complex sound environments, from the experience of standing inside a house during a tornado to simulating the roar of a packed football stadium to better understand how crowd noise affects athletes on game day.
The Cube's motion capture system has also supported groundbreaking research. In one internationally recognized project, researchers transformed the space into an indoor glide arena, using its cameras to record flying snakes in midair to develop a 3D model of their flight.
Designed for Artists
For composers and sound artists, the Cube isn't simply a venue. It's part of the creative process. Instead of writing for a stage or a traditional speaker system, they compose with the space itself, treating the Cube as an extension of their musical palette. Sound becomes another creative material, something composers can shape and move through the room as deliberately as melody, harmony, or rhythm.
The Cube's immersive audio system opens creative possibilities found in only a handful of spaces worldwide, inspiring artists from around the globe to develop and premiere works created specifically for this unique environment because they simply couldn't exist in the same way anywhere else.
That's why composers, sound artists, researchers, and creative technologists travel from around the world to work in the Cube. It's not simply a place to present finished ideas. It's a place where new ideas begin.