Sonosfera® is a technological sound amphitheater designed and engineered by David Monacchi, a unique spherical space for sensorial and cognitive experiences of ecosystems and music. As a mobile theatre, based on an international patent and trademark, Sonosfera® can travel in contemporary art, science and cultural venues.

The theatre is today a cultural platform for expressing multidisciplinary and multi-code programs. The 3-dimensional sound and 360° experience delivered by 45 loudspeakers and a 24k-resolution azimuth screen is in fact radically different from the solipsistic 1-person VR immersions given by headsets: in Sonosfera® individuals sit together in the same cavea, as in an ancient theatre; the experience is thus a shared virtual reality where humans are again guests of complex ecosystems, which breath and thrive all around them.

Sonosfera®  was originally invented and engineered for the specific scope of reproducing the 3-dimensional sound of primary forests to broad audiences, within the framework of the long-term project “Fragments of Extinction”. The project is recording sonic fragments in the most ancient and biodiverse untouched equatorial rainforests left on Earth since 2002. The goal is to store for posterity 24-hour-long sound portraits of the intangible heritage of nature, and to share them immediately through deep-listening experiences for reflecting on the biodiversity and climate crises. We are strongly convinced that the medium of sensorial art will help in filling the gap between some of the most “unconfortable” issues of our time (the 6th mass extinction and the existential threat represented by climate change) and the ecological transition, now urgently required in all our societies. 

For 200,000 years our species has shaped the world around us by transforming Nature into Matter, as a tool, instrument, home. We then grew to influence the very geological processes of the biosphere, and now, at the dawn of the Anthropocene, must use all our intelligence to remedy the decline in the stability of the ‘common home’ and the networks of life that support us.

Sonosfera® fits into this epochal ecological transition as an accelerator of consciousness, a ‘time machine’ where high technology (Matter) paradoxically allows reconnection with the primordial world (Nature) through profound sensorial and cognitive experiences. The sound of the most biodiverse and oldest forest ecosystems on Earth, recorded in 3D and reproduced in spherical periphony, becomes the portal to make that leap of awareness, in the dark into the intimacy of individual listening. However, a collective architectural space, designed to find oneself as guests of archaic habitats, in an experience at the crossroads of nature, art and technology, key themes of the long-term work Fragments of Extinction by David Monacchi and Pesaro, Italian Capital of Culture 2024.