Built By Sound, Bradford 2025
A month-long mixed-reality theatre piece at Loading Bay for the UK City of Culture, scripted by Nikesh Shukla and directed by Shehani Fernando.
A mixed-reality theatre piece where memory moves to a beat.
History, remixed. Built By Sound is a mixed-reality experience exploring how British South Asian communities in the 1970s and ’80s found joy in defiance, in community and in music.
Dialled In and No Ghost brought us in to design the real-world lighting layer that wraps each scene in the headset, and to put a robust show-control rig in place for a month-long free run at Loading Bay for Bradford 2025.
A mixed-reality theatre commission for the City of Culture
Where the headset ends, the room begins
A month-long run at the heart of Bradford 2025
Built By Sound ran at Loading Bay from 21 November to 21 December 2025 as one of the headline commissions of Bradford 2025, the UK City of Culture year. Scripted by Nikesh Shukla and directed by Shehani Fernando, it sits at the intersection of theatre, archive and game design: a mixed-reality piece for small audiences where archival footage, personal testimonies and a propulsive soundtrack pull the wearer through a story of resistance, rhythm and community.
The piece traces how British South Asian communities in the 1970s and ’80s found joy in defiance, in community and in music, from the thump of dhol drums in community halls to pirate radio buzzing through bedroom walls.
The ask
Lighting that lives on both sides of the headset
The brief from Dialled In and No Ghost was unusual. The augmented-reality parts of the experience needed real-world lighting the audience could feel: colour, glow and shifts in temperature that the headset couldn’t fake on its own.
We were asked to consult on lighting design, fixture selection and layout, then put a robust control solution in place that could lock to the audio bed and respond to each guest as they moved through the room.
One brand of fixtures, two timelines
Lighting that listens to the headset
Fixtures
A Chauvet rig, supplied via hire and supported purchase
We supplied the entire lighting rig as a single-brand Chauvet Professional system, made possible by Chauvet’s supported pricing for Bradford 2025. Some fixtures came out of our hire stock; others were purchased through us for Bradford City of Culture to keep beyond the run.
The mix was kept tight and purposeful: Chauvet Professional Colorado Solo One LED pars for wash and colour, Chauvet DJ Shocker FX panels for high-impact framing moments, and Chauvet DJ Pinspot Bars for targeted accents. Keeping everything in the Chauvet family meant predictable colour, easy spares, and fast turnarounds across the month-long run.
Control
A ChamSys MQ70 talking to a game engine
Show control sat on a Chamsys MagicQ MQ70, driving the room with a cue stack written against the script. The timeline itself lives in Reaper, which doubles as the audio engine and the master clock. As each guest moves through the experience, the headset game server sends positional data back to the show, triggering specific sections of the Reaper project as they cross from scene to scene.
Integration
LTC as the glue between the two worlds
A Chamsys GN5 ArtNet node bridges the two worlds, reading LTC out of Reaper and handing it to the MQ70 so lighting cues stay locked to the audio bed even as the trigger order shifts with the audience. Wherever a guest stops to look, the room around them keeps time with what they’re hearing in the headset.
A month of free public performances
Memory moves to a beat
The run
Built for a month, designed to tour
Built By Sound opened on 21 November and ran free through to 21 December 2025, with Loading Bay programmed back-to-back to keep the small-audience sessions moving. The control rig held across the full run with no day-to-day intervention from us, and the creative team are exploring a tour in 2026.
Photography by Andrew Benge. More on the piece on the Bradford 2025 event page.
Inside the experience
