The Backrooms: Audio Drama

This is a binaural recording piece. Wear headphones/earphones for the best experience.

This is a trial to extend the Radio Play assignment into an audio drama. The protagonist suddenly “no-clipped” into a weird space where he witnessed (or better, heard) things beyond his comprehension. The main inspiration comes from the urban legend The Backrooms, portrayed as an impossibly large extradimensional expanse of empty rooms, accessed by “no-clipping out of” reality. The plots are also inspired by, of course, the Cthulhu series.

In this piece, I explore the psychological effects of reverberation and room acoustics – how they drastically change the perception of space, and thus can be integrated into a narrative without graphics. The imagination of audiences plays a big role here. What happened to the protagonist in the end? Let the acoustic environment tell the story for you.

Technically, I used a pair of binaural microphones (thank you, Constantin) for recording. Certain parts of the recording actually happened in my dorm and in Knoll (remember running down the stairs). Later, they are arranged, juxtaposed, twisted, and reverberated. Some creepy samples are downloaded from Splice.