With an extended run through December in L.A., Chained: A Victorian Nightmare has made its mark as an immersive theater VR adaptation of Charles Dickens’ classic tale, “A Christmas Carol.” Helping to drive the experience is a soundtrack from audio director Drazen Bosnjak of Q Department.
In this single-guest experience, each visitor interacts with live actors in both real and virtual spaces, traveling through an exquisitely detailed physical set into the spirit world of 19th-century London. To “cross over,” the guest will be placed in a VR headset to travel to otherworldly scenes and converse with powerful and terrifying spirits.
Composers through the ages have delighted in interpreting temporality in multifarious ways. Audio director Dražen Bošnjak’s mixed reality sound world to Justin Denton’s gothic version of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” Chained: A Victorian Nightmare suspends time between “reality” and “virtual reality.”
Interwoven into the quietude of this project, Q Department’s music and sound design spatializes the whir and hum of Denton’s post-industrial Victorian metropolis. Original music soundscapes meld with baroque period instruments, featuring adaptations of “La Folia” by Rodrigo Martinez, “Folias Gallegas” by Santiago de Murcia, and “Alceste” by Lully; immutable spirits drag foley’d chains where the phantom of reality itself becomes unchained.
Q Department’s track was spatialized and mixed using the Mach 1 Spatial System. The track was implemented in Unreal Engine, using the combined techniques of UE native Source Point, Stereo, Mach 1 Stereo Source Point [SSP] and Mach 1 Spatial System Sound Actors. The music was performed by a baroque period specialist ensemble featuring Theorbo, Baroque Guitar, Cello, Violin and Percussion; recorded at Q Department’s studio via a pure analog path to a Studer tape machine, transferred to the digital domain via superior A/D converters and mastered through analog EQ, compression and limiting.
