Culture is future » Innovation and digital

CULTURAL START-UP OF THE WEEK: Augmented Acoustics

For our online cultural entrepreneur series, the Forum d’Avignon presents to you: Augmented Acoustics a Parisienne start-up which offers spectators to access High-resolution personalisable and multitracks sound for a unique immersive experience with their favorite artist in concert.

What is your project/idea/start-up?

Augmented Acoustics has devised a new way of experiencing live music. Our solution, through headphones, a receiver device (the Peeble^®) and a mobile application, offers the most demanding spectators, the option to access a High-Definition sound as well as plenty of audio settings, allowing them to become in real time their own sound engineer, without latency, while preserving their hearing (instruments and general volume setup, tone, equalizers, etc.). In addition, our calibration feature will guarantee users a sound perfectly adapted to their hearing specificities.

What challenges do you face in your development?

Our innovation is disruptive as it offers a new approach of live music that we need to prove relevant. Wearing headphones in concert is sometimes considered as putting the brakes on the adoption of the service, but this barrier falls as soon as the service is tested. In this context, we are looking for partnerships with concert halls or festivals in order to increase awareness of our solution and conduct experiments. Besides, our project requires a significant financial effort and we are in a fundraising stage to reach a commercial launch of our project.

For you, what does it mean to be a cultural entrepreneur?

Our project is at the crossroads of technology and culture. Nevertheless, we consider ourselves as cultural entrepreneurs in the sense that our solution addresses the world of the live performing arts (concerts, theatre ...) targeting both tech savvy music lover’s spectators, fans but also people who use hearing protection and finally hearing-impaired persons. Our greatest satisfaction would be to make it possible for those hearing-impaired persons to return to concerts. We chose to integrate the 104factory incubator in order to facilitate our integration into the cultural ecosystem, to experiment our solution in partnership with resident artists, and integrates concerts held at Cent-Quatre.

Photo Credit © A_Acoustics

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The web series : we’re interviewing cultural start-ups – Contact us!

As part of its web series on cultural entrepreneurship, the Forum d’Avignon is proud to present each week exciting stories on cultural start-ups.

This project is part of the Forum d’Avignon’s on-going work, in line with its 2015 agenda, on the ‘hybridization of economic models in cultural and on the manifesto on cultural entrepreneurship in creative industries (to be published soon).

To participate and promote your cultural start-up on the Forum d’Avignon’s website: please send to the address forum-avignon.org@orange.fr:

• A photo (website/founders/logo) in HD
• A video link presenting your project
• A short answer (2-3 lines, in English and French) to the following three questions:

                        - What is your project/idea/start-up?

                        - What is your current challenge?

                        - For you, what does it mean to be a cultural entrepreneur