© 2026 Crucial FX. This demonstration, its code and its design are our copyright · Terms
Store your mix locally keeps it in this browser and puts it in the address, so the page comes back the way you left it. Copy code turns it into a short piece of text you can send a colleague, and they open this same forest with your design already in it. Paste one they send you into Use a code.
Paste the code somebody sent you and press Enter.
Sound designs. Mark’s Tranquil Mix and Mark’s Eerie Mix are two finished balances of the same twelve sounds, and they are worth hearing back to back. Nothing is added between them and nothing is replaced. The birds go, something starts circling overhead, the room becomes a cave, and the forest stops being somewhere you would want to walk. Same trees, same water, same boat. That is what the sound is doing. Design your own hands you the empty stage.
The sound row, along the bottom. Press any sound to select it, then drag it anywhere around the boat. Press Locate and the camera goes and finds it. Closing its panel keeps the sound selected, so you can place it with the scene in full view.
The mixer. One channel strip per sound, exactly like a desk. The fader sets level, the meter beside it shows what that sound is actually doing, Solo leaves only the sounds you have soloed, and Mute drops the channel and greys the strip.
Space effects. Off, a large room, or a cave. This is the room the sound is happening in, and it obeys distance: the further a sound sits from the guest, the more of the room you hear on it.
The send, on every strip. The small rotary above each fader is how much of that sound goes into the room, marked in dB. Wind it up from nothing and the channel joins the room. Wind it back to nothing and it leaves. The switch beside it does the same in one press, and pressing it on from zero gives you unity. Every channel opens at 0 dB.
The master strip. The same again for the whole show: master level, a stereo meter reading the real output, and one rotary and switch controlling how much room the mix gets overall.
Save, load and copy. Save keeps this mix in the browser and writes it into the address, so the link carries your mix. Load brings it back. Copy gives you a code you can send to us, and it now carries the space effects as well as the positions.
Why sound comes first.
Sound is where a world starts to breathe. It fills the space between what a guest can see, carries the story into the dark, and gives a scene the weight that makes it feel real.
We design sound in three dimensions from the first sketch, because audio is one part of the mix: creative, technology and experience, built as one. A whisper that passes behind you. A call from somewhere upriver that turns your head. Water moving under the boat.
That is where the magic is. The moment a guest stops watching an attraction and starts believing they are inside one, feeling something they will still be talking about on the way out.
This is a show design view of that process, and a fraction of the power of our spatial audio studios.
We build tools like this one in-house, so our creative team can hear an idea and play with it long before a single speaker goes on a wall. Moving a sound and listening to what it does is worth more than any amount of describing it, and writing the software to make that possible is part of what we do.
Spatial audio is one of the signature experiences we specialise in. At Gardaland, we used over 250 speakers to create the right mood for the attraction, each one positioned in three dimensions. It is how we do things, and one of the ways we make an experience XOrdinary. Talk to us about how we can bring your attraction to life.
In the attraction itself this is built from a large number of speakers, each one placed in three dimensions around the guest. Here we recreate that effect binaurally, through two ears instead of an array of speakers. It will play through a laptop or a phone, but the placement, and most of the magic, only arrives through headphones.
This experience is about curating a spatial audio experience for the guest in the boat. Every individual sound is represented along the bottom of the screen. Click a sound to open it, use locate to see where it is, then drag it to move it, or use orbit to animate it.
You can adjust the camera at any time. Go into Control the mix to hear Mark’s Tranquil Mix and Mark’s Eerie Mix, two designs built from the same twelve sounds, or click Design your own to select which sounds you want and position them yourself.