UNFEST’26 is a Creative Technology festival held at Cloud 11, Bangkok, from 11-13 September 2026. The festival brings together artists, creators, technologists and industry professionals to explore new possibilities in storytelling and creative production through real-time technology. Its UNLIVE program focuses specifically on live music performances that combine real-time technology, visuals and sound to explore new forms of immersive live performance.

At this year’s festival, Sonos Libra brought Adamson Fletcher Machine to Spatial Stage 218, a live performance space where artists performed alongside real-time visuals and lighting.

The format created a different kind of challenge for the sound system. Rather than simply reproducing a conventional stereo mix, the spatial system allowed sound to be positioned and shaped within the performance space, creating another dimension for artists to work with.

Fletcher Machine is designed as a spatial audio platform with tools for managing 2D and 3D speaker configurations, object grouping and linking, external control protocols, timecode and a delay matrix with user-assignable gain and delay. The Fletcher Machine Stage can also provide up to 128 × 128 inputs and outputs at 96 kHz, with 1.3 ms latency.

But for Sonos Libra and the artists involved, the project was not simply about bringing new technology to the stage. It started much earlier.

Sonos Libra worked with Unformat Studio from the beginning of the project, starting with a series of Spatial Audio workshops at Uncommu from 5 August, held weekly ahead of the festival.

Across the workshops, artists and creators were introduced to spatial audio and the Adamson Fletcher Machine system, while exploring how sound could be used beyond the conventional left-right stereo field.

The sessions were not limited to technical operation. They also explored acoustics, psychoacoustics and the relationship between sound, space and human perception.

As Alfonso Martin, CEO of Sonos Libra, explained during one of the workshops, spatial audio opens up additional parameters for artists to work with, including distance, movement, position, artificial reverberation and room emulation.

From these sessions, artists began developing and testing their own ideas with the system. What started as a workshop gradually became preparation for the performances at UNFEST’26.

At Spatial Stage 218, the audience surrounded a central performance area, with loudspeakers positioned around the space. This configuration introduced another important part of the system design: the relationship between the audience and the loudspeakers.

According to Alfonso, speaker placement and audience positioning had to be carefully considered so that the intended spatial effects could be perceived properly. The venue itself also presented an acoustic challenge, with the concrete environment requiring additional acoustic treatment.

The result was a performance environment where sound, visuals, lighting and the physical space worked together.

For the artists, some participants were directly working with the Fletcher Machine system and developing how their own sound should behave within the space.

As the workshops moved towards the festival, the system became part of the creative process itself, from experimenting with spatial sound, to developing performances, and finally presenting those ideas to an audience at UNFEST’26.

For Sonos Libra and Unformat Studio, the journey from workshop to stage became an opportunity to explore how spatial audio can connect artists, technology and live performance in a different way. And at Spatial Stage 218, the experiment moved from the workshop into the real world.