The Sonic Laboratory at SARC could best be thought of as a ‘cinema for the ear’ – a specialist acoustic space designed to provide a unique and immersive listening experience. Forty-eight loudspeakers, strategically located, project and move sounds throughout the 360 degrees of the space, including above and underneath the audience. The Sonic Lab was designed with an acoustically transparent, modular grid floor suspended 4m above the basement level. As a research facility, the lab provides unique opportunities to explore new ideas and practices relating to performance, augmented reality, room acoustics, music perception, musical human-computer interaction, new instrument design and sound engineering.