The Road to Yesterday- 2025
The Road to Yesterday (2025) explores three interconnected techniques of ' haptic sound' : (1) low-frequency audio to create bodily resonance; (2) selectively spatialized environmental sound to deepen immersion while preserving narrative clarity by keeping music and voice-over non-spatialized; and (3) vibrotactile feedback synchronized with sonic events to simulate tactile sensations. Together, these strategies create a sense of sonic tactility, weaving an invisible net between sound, memory, and feeling. Visually, the practice combines hand-drawn animation with 360-degree live-action video.
The Road to Yesterday (2025)
An immersive poetic documentary about the story: After losing her grandmother during the pandemic, a granddaughter revisits their bond through haptic-sound and immersive memory. In a quiet virtual space, grief trembles like a butterfly landing in the dark.
Voiceover: The moon is gone from the sky tonight, I search for you in the river’s light. Softly I gaze, the mist drifts away, through the window of time, the past still stays. Along the corridor where moments flow, a dream-born butterfly starts to show, landing gently upon my sleeve, a whisper of you I still believe. When once again your light is cast, our darkroom reunion binds the past.
Haptic sound approach in The Road to Yesterday
The Road to Yesterday, the study explores three interconnected techniques: (1) low-frequency audio to create bodily resonance; (2) selectively spatialized environmental sound to deepen immersion while preserving narrative clarity by keeping music and voice-over non-spatialized; (3) vibrotactile feedback synchronized with sonic events to simulate tactile sensations. These strategies together create a sense of sonic tactility. The practice contributes both conceptually and methodologically to the emerging field of CVR sound aesthetics and suggests new directions for low-budget, multisensory documentary practices. As CVR matures and the novelty of the medium declines, it argues for a shift in focus toward narrative experimentation and affective engagement to sustain the medium’s creative and representational potential.
First, the use of low-frequency audio to establish a sense of bodily resonance and weight. I use low frequency to enhance the tactile qualities of the sonic experience. Sounds such as distant thunder, the vibration of the train, falling rains were designed with heightened low-frequency content to create a sense of bodily resonance. Low-frequency sound has been widely discussed in multisensory and embodied sound studies for its ability to elicit physical sensations and emotional affect. In sound aesthetics perspective, for background music and the design of sound effects creation, I inspired by Hou Hsiao-hsien’s musical aesthetics in A City of Sadness (1989), the sound-space is always a little bigger than the visual field - but it is no less stylised, no less filtered and pre-planned, no less diagrammatic for that (Martin, 2008).
Second, in the spatialisation of sound, I used software Reaper to spatialized part of sound. I allowed voice-over and music to remain non-spatialised to guide emotional meaning, while spatialising the environmental and diegetic sound to support a more embodied and immersive sensory field.
Third, in the haptic feedback stage, I used Unity to design physical tactile responses linked to specific sonic events. During the first 30 seconds of the experience, as the sound of rain becomes perceptible, spatialised raindrop effects gradually emerge in the environment. Simultaneously, the immersant’s hand controllers begin to emit a series of fine, intermittent vibrations. These vibrations are synchronised with the sound wave and texture of the selective audio such as raining, simulating the sensation of raindrops ‘falling on the skin.’ By mapping sound waves to haptic impulses, this design transforms auditory perception into a layered, multisensory experience, where sound is not only heard but also physically felt.