Where Sound Becomes Visible
THIS IS RED Helps Bring the Dolby x Mercedes-Benz Experience to Life at Philharmonie Luxembourg
LUXEMBOURG — What happens when one of the world's most advanced immersive audio technologies meets one of the world's most recognizable luxury automotive brands inside one of Europe's great concert halls?
At Philharmonie Luxembourg, the answer is an experience designed to make visitors not simply hear music differently, but feel surrounded by it.
The Dolby x Mercedes-Benz Experience brings together Dolby Atmos, Mercedes-Benz and the Luxembourg Philharmonic in an immersive installation that demonstrates how music can move seamlessly from the concert hall to an immersive listening environment—and ultimately into the automobile.
And helping give that experience a visual dimension is Pittsburgh-based global creative agency THIS IS RED.
THIS IS RED was brought into the collaboration to develop the animated visual experience accompanying the music, creating a series of richly detailed worlds designed to complement compositions performed by the Luxembourg Philharmonic and presented in Dolby Atmos.
The project brought together many of the disciplines that have defined THIS IS RED's work over the years: animation, music, technology, visual storytelling and immersive media.
From the Concert Hall to the Car
Located in Luxembourg City's Kirchberg district, Philharmonie Luxembourg is one of Europe's leading concert venues and welcomes more than 200,000 visitors annually. The Dolby x Mercedes-Benz installation creates an unusual bridge between that traditional concert experience and the future of recorded music.
Inside the experiential space, visitors hear music recorded by the Luxembourg Philharmonic and mixed in Dolby Atmos. Rather than presenting sound through conventional stereo channels, Dolby Atmos allows individual elements to be positioned throughout a three-dimensional sound field, creating a sense of depth, movement and space around the listener.
The technology is also available across a range of Mercedes-Benz vehicles, where Dolby Atmos works with compatible Burmester audio systems to transform the cabin into an immersive listening environment.
The Philharmonie installation makes that connection tangible.
Visitors can experience immersive music in one of Europe's most celebrated musical institutions and then understand how that same philosophy of spatial listening translates into a Mercedes-Benz.
It's a meeting point between music, architecture, technology and automotive design.
Giving Immersive Sound a Visual Language
For THIS IS RED, the challenge was different.
How do you create images for music that is specifically designed to exist all around you?
The agency developed the visual content for the experience through a process encompassing visual development, storyboarding, world building, animation and compositing, along with Dolby Atmos quality assurance.
Rather than simply illustrating the compositions, the goal was to create imagery capable of extending their character.
The music selected for the experience spans generations of classical composition, including works associated with Gioachino Rossini, Henri Dutilleux, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Gustav Mahler and Giacomo Puccini.
Each presented a radically different creative starting point.
Rossini's rhythmic energy is worlds apart from the color and modernism of Dutilleux. Rimsky-Korsakov's orchestral imagination offers a different landscape again, while Mahler's enormous emotional scale and Puccini's cinematic sense of drama suggest entirely different visual possibilities.
Rather than forcing those compositions into a single visual template, THIS IS RED approached them as individual worlds.
Animation became another layer of interpretation—responding to the movement, texture, scale and emotion already present within the music.
Music You Can Move Through
The experience reflects a larger idea behind Dolby Atmos: music doesn't necessarily have to exist in front of the listener.
It can exist around them.
Electronic artist and composer Max Cooper, who experienced the installation before his performance at the Philharmonie, described the unusual sensation of being able to physically move through the listening environment and discover different elements of an Atmos mix depending on where he stood.
That changes the relationship between audience and recording.
A traditional listening experience largely asks the audience to face forward. Immersive audio can turn the room itself into part of the composition.
The visual component extends that idea further.
Sound moves through space. Imagery evolves with it. And the visitor becomes less of a spectator and more of a participant inside the piece.
A Natural Collaboration for THIS IS RED
The Luxembourg project continues a long-running creative relationship between THIS IS RED and Dolby.
Over the years, the Pittsburgh agency has worked across numerous areas of the Dolby brand, including Dolby Atmos, Dolby Vision and Dolby Cinema—creating brand films, animation, visual identities, product storytelling and experiential content.
That relationship has had a significant influence on THIS IS RED itself.
The company's headquarters—a 20,000-square-foot, century-old former church in Pittsburgh—has been rebuilt around many of the same ideas of immersive storytelling. The facility includes its own fully equipped Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision cinema, alongside spaces for film production, animation, photography, music and immersive content creation.
In that sense, the Philharmonie Luxembourg assignment sits naturally at the intersection of disciplines THIS IS RED has spent years bringing together.
It is animation created by people who understand filmmaking.
Visuals created by people who understand music.
And content designed for immersive technology by a company that works with that technology inside its own building.
Three Brands, One Experience
For Mercedes-Benz, the installation also provides an opportunity to demonstrate something that can be difficult to communicate through a specification sheet.
Dolby Atmos isn't simply another feature in an audio system.
It changes the spatial relationship between the listener and the music.
Mercedes-Benz has integrated Dolby Atmos across numerous vehicles, including models within its E-Class, S-Class, Mercedes-Maybach, EQS, EQE, GLE and other ranges. The collaboration between Mercedes-Benz and Dolby combines immersive audio, vehicle hardware and streaming content into a single in-car listening environment.
At Philharmonie Luxembourg, that technology is given cultural context.
The orchestra provides the music.
Dolby provides the immersive audio environment.
Mercedes-Benz provides the automotive experience.
And THIS IS RED helps make the invisible visible.
Together, they create something that exists somewhere between a concert, an installation, an animated film and a technology demonstration.
Creating an Experience, Not Explaining a Technology
That distinction may be the most important aspect of the project.
Immersive technologies can be difficult to describe because their value isn't completely understood until they are experienced.
Dolby itself has increasingly explored experiential installations as a way of connecting its technology with film, television, music and art—turning technical capabilities into something audiences can immediately see, hear and feel.
The Philharmonie project follows that philosophy.
Instead of explaining what spatial audio does, it surrounds the listener with it.
Instead of explaining how animation can respond to music, it allows imagery and sound to operate together.
And instead of describing how a concert-hall experience might translate into an automobile, Mercedes-Benz puts the listener inside the car.
For THIS IS RED, it's also representative of the kind of work the company has increasingly built its practice around: projects where the boundaries between advertising, entertainment, technology, art and experience begin to disappear.
At Philharmonie Luxembourg, those disciplines converge around something considerably older than any of the technology involved.
Music.
Only now, the audience isn't simply listening to it.
They're inside it.