the Future of Audio Description

Access to dance, theatre, and film for non-visual audiences has traditionally been in the form of audio description. Blind and low vision fans of Kinetic Light shared their desire for a more encompassing, more aesthetic experience of verbal description. In 2016, their challenges to current best practice led us to imagine the future of audio description differently.

What if your audio description experience offered you choices—different styles of description, soundscapes, poetry, prose? What if you could listen to dance intentionally created as a direct artistic experience and not just someone else's secondhand description of the experience?

Initially developed in association with Kinetic Light’s DESCENT and premiered with multi-track content to live audiences in early 2018, Audimance is the first app that allows audiences to create their own aural experience of a dance. Using an innovative interface, audience members can access our specially-developed sound content and choose the content and complexity of their experience. Kinetic Light's ongoing practice of multitrack description and spatialized aural experience often offers seven to twelve tracks.

While popular practice requires venues to supply specific listening devices, Audimance is designed to be compatible with most people’s phones or tablets. By focusing on consumer technology, Audimance makes it possible for attendees to access description at venues of all sizes, for venues to easily offer audio access to their performances, and for artists to create and deliver one or multiple tracks of audio description for their performance or installation.